Ben was standing a short distance behind me, still holding his father’s cap.
His fingers tightened around it.
I stepped between him and Monica.
“These trees are not yours. This property is not yours. Don’t come into my yard again.”
“Oh, please. Grief has made you hysterical.”
“Leave the fruit and go.”
Monica stared at me before letting go of one of the bags.
“You’ve always been very protective once you decide something belongs to you.”
I frowned.
“What is that supposed to mean?”
“Nothing.”
“No. You meant something.”
She climbed back over the fence.
Before walking away, she turned and looked at me.
“Funny how your entire life depended on one red light twenty-seven years ago.”
Everything inside me went cold.
“What did you say?”
But Monica was already heading toward her house.
Ben tugged on my sleeve.
“Mom, what did she mean?”
“I don’t know.”
That was a lie.
I knew exactly which red light she meant.
What I couldn’t understand was how Monica knew.
Daniel and I met twenty-seven years earlier because he ran a red light while turning and clipped me while I was crossing the street.
I wasn’t seriously injured.
Daniel had been horrified.
He insisted on driving me to the hospital himself, stayed until the doctors released me, drove me home, and returned the next morning carrying coffee and another apology.
Over the years, it became our private joke.
One terrible red light had somehow given us twenty-seven years together.
We told people the general story of how we’d met.
But Daniel had always hated admitting that he had actually run the light.
That detail stayed between us.
At least, I thought it had.
Yet Monica knew.
That night, I tried to convince myself that Daniel must have told her after she moved next door.
Maybe it meant nothing.
I was too exhausted to keep thinking about it.
Before sunrise the following morning, Ben shook my shoulder.
“Mom, come outside. I heard something scary.”
I put on my robe and followed him.
The second I stepped onto the patio, I froze.
Every fruit tree was bare.
Not partly picked.
Completely stripped.
Broken twigs covered the lawn.
Leaves had been crushed into the grass.
Daniel’s wooden ladder lay on its side near the fence.
I walked toward the nearest apple tree and touched a branch that had been covered in fruit less than twenty-four hours earlier.
Something inside me broke.
