CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN The Lemon Tree
Two weeks after the reunion, Maya received an alert from a real estate app she had forgotten she still used.A house in View Park was for sale.Spanish style.
Three bedrooms. Arched doorways. Original hardwood floors.A lemon tree in the backyard.Maya stared at the screen.It was the house.The same house Andre had printed for her the night she was secretly texting Jalen.The listing photographs were different now.
New paint. Updated kitchen. Someone had replaced the gray laminate floors with oak.Andre would have approved.Maya nearly deleted the alert.Instead, she scheduled a viewing.The open house was quiet when she arrived Sunday morning.
A cheerful agent handed her shoe covers and began listing renovations.Maya barely heard.She walked through the living room and remembered Andre sliding the printed page across the restaurant table.Our house.They had never even visited it together.Yet Maya had given the address mythical power, as if the property had been waiting all these years to prove what she lost.The actual house was smaller than she imagined.
The kitchen was beautiful but narrow.One bedroom faced a neighbor's wall.The primary bathroom had terrible tile.Maya smiled.Fantasy had renovated the place more thoroughly than any contractor could.Then she stepped into the backyard.The lemon tree was still there.Larger now.Branches bent under yellow fruit.Maya walked toward it and touched one leaf between her fingers.For a moment, tears came.Not because she wanted the house.Because she finally understood she had been grieving symbols.A lemon tree.An unopened bottle of wine.A Cabo photograph.A man at eighteen.A man at thirty-five.Objects and moments had become containers for futures that never happened.The agent stepped outside.
"Beautiful yard, right?""It is.""Are you looking for yourself or a family?
"Maya smiled."Myself."The answer felt good.She did not make an offer.The house belonged to somebody else's future now.Maya drove home with the windows down.At a stoplight, she passed a nursery and pulled in on impulse.Twenty minutes later, she left with a small Meyer lemon tree in a black plastic pot.She planted it in a large container on her balcony that afternoon.Not as a memorial.As something alive that belonged to the life she actually had.