I Finally Let Mia Off the Leash

A 10th anniversary re-release!

There’s a moment in Tomorrow’s June where Mia catalogs her own decline out loud: she went from Kurt, to Noah, to Miles, each one caring for her a little less than the last, and she says it the way you’d read off a grocery list. Flat. Precise. No self-pity, no melodrama, just a woman naming the pattern while she’s still standing inside it.

That line is the closest thing this book has to a thesis statement, and it took me a long time to be willing to write it down.

Tomorrow’s June is fiction. It’s also not. Mia is not me, except for the parts of her that are: the Toledo of it, the years of it, the men who came and went while I waited for one of them to hand me a life I already had the ability to build myself. I didn’t set out to write a redemption story because, for a long stretch of my twenties, redemption wasn’t really on offer. What was on offer was insight. I always knew exactly what I was doing. Knowing didn’t stop me from doing it.

That’s the messy part, and it’s the part I refused to sand down in revision. It would have been easier to write a Mia who didn’t see it coming: easier for readers, easier for me. But a woman who watches herself circle the same drain with her eyes open is a truer thing, even when it’s a harder thing to sit with. The self-awareness doesn’t rescue her. It just means she must carry the decisions and the knowledge of them at the same time.

If there’s a hinge in the book, it’s not a romance resolution. It’s Mia realizing that permission was never anyone else’s to give — not Kurt’s, not the next one’s, not the one after that. It was sitting in an application for a curatorial job she’d been too scared to submit. Growing up, it turns out, isn’t dramatic. It’s a deadline you finally stop letting yourself miss.Tomorrow’s June is out now on Draft2Digital, wherever you get your ebooks. If you’ve ever known exactly what you were doing and done it anyway, this one’s for you