Lemon Pound Cake Club
Prologue
Some people saw lemon trees as beautiful. When I looked at one, all I saw was what my family had lost.
A morning breeze moved through the branches in my front yard, making the lemons sway until one finally dropped. It landed on the grass with a soft thud. It shouldn’t have mattered, but it did. It felt like a reminder I couldn’t ignore.
I held my coffee mug with both hands, even though the coffee was already cold. I hadn’t taken a sip. I couldn’t remember the last morning I stood on this porch without staring at the lemon tree.
Most people would have admired it. It was healthy, full, and blooming. I couldn’t, though. Every branch reminded me that something living there had survived what happened to my family.
That tree was here before I arrived. Before my husband, Zaire, found this house. Before my family fell apart.
Sometimes I wondered what the tree would say if it could talk. Would it tell the truth about what happened, or would it keep the same lies everyone else did? It sounded ridiculous. Trees don’t remember anything. People do. At least, the ones who want to.
Lemon Grove Estates was the kind of neighborhood people drove through just to admire. Million-dollar homes lined quiet streets behind neat hedges and iron gates. Luxury SUVs filled the driveways. Women waved from their porches with easy smiles while children rode bikes without a care.
It all seemed perfect. That was the danger. I’ve learned that evil rarely looks the way you expect. Sometimes it’s fresh flowers on the table. Sometimes it’s just a warm smile.
Sometimes it’s a woman offering you a slice of homemade lemon pound cake while quietly taking everything you once had.
I looked back at the tree. The grass beneath it grew differently from the rest of the yard. Maybe grief made me notice things others missed. Or maybe some places just can’t forget the people who used to live there.
I wasn’t sure anymore. Grief blurs the line between memory and obsession. Some days I could still hear her laugh. It was the kind of laugh that made you believe everything would be okay.
Other days, I couldn’t remember her laugh at all. Somehow, that hurt even more.
Another lemon dropped. People always said time healed all wounds, but they were wrong. Time didn’t heal anything.
It just taught you how to carry the pain without letting anyone see how heavy it really was.
I poured my cold coffee into the flower bed and watched it soak into the soil.
Zaire thought I was outside enjoying the morning. He understood why we chose this house and why this neighborhood was important to us. He reached out to all his real estate contacts to help us make this place our home.
But what he didn’t realize was that every morning, when I stood on the porch, I wasn’t looking forward to a fresh start.
Instead, I felt like I was standing in the middle of someone else’s lost ending.