I didn’t plan to write Leigh E. into *Comings and Goings*. In fact, I didn’t realize I had—until I reread a scene and felt something shift.

Kelly Moore, as she appears in the novella, was always her own person: emotionally fluent, quietly confident, and possessed of that rare kind of presence that doesn’t ask for space—it simply belongs. But as I lingered on a particular moment, I recognized something familiar. Her cadence, her physicality, even the lilt in her voice… they weren’t imagined. They were remembered.

Leigh and I have been friends for over twenty years. Southern, whip-smart, adventurous, and beautiful in that unassuming way that makes you feel lucky just to know her. I sent her a message with an excerpt, half-apologetic, half-curious. She read it and replied, “LOL, yep, that’s me!” And just like that, fiction folded back into life.

A few minutes later, she sent me a screenshot: the epigraph from *Comings and Goings*, that line from *Summer of ’42*—“Life is a series of comings and goings.” She’d bought the Kindle edition. Not out of obligation, but because something in those words felt familiar. Felt true.

There’s a quiet magic in moments like this. When a character you thought you’d invented turns out to be someone you’ve known all along. When a friend sees herself in your work and embraces it with joy. When fiction doesn’t just echo memory—it finds its muse in real time.

Kelly Moore will always be her own character. But now, she carries a little more of Leigh’s light. And that makes the story feel even more like home.