That night I almost convinced myself Daniel must have mentioned it to her sometime after she moved next door.
I was too exhausted to search for another explanation.
Before sunrise, Ben shook my shoulder. “Mom… come outside. I heard a scary noise, and it woke me up.”
I kissed his forehead and pulled on a robe.
I stepped onto the patio.
Then I stopped.
Every tree was bare.
Not mostly picked. Not missing a few branches of fruit. Bare.
Broken twigs covered the grass. Leaves had been crushed beneath someone’s shoes, and Daniel’s wooden ladder lay on its side near the fence.
I walked toward the nearest apple tree and touched a branch that had held dozens of apples the day before.
Something inside me cracked.
I looked toward Monica’s house.
Her kitchen lights were on.
I didn’t knock on Monica’s door. Not yet. Instead, I checked the shed, the fence, and the ground around the trees. I took pictures of everything. Then I stopped beside Daniel’s fallen ladder.
Monica had come back after I’d caught her. After I’d warned her. After she’d seen Ben standing there with his father’s cap in his hands. Nobody risked that much for a few hundred dollars’ worth of fruit.
Whatever she’d taken from my garden, that wasn’t about apples anymore.
By eight o’clock I was sitting at my kitchen table with my laptop open.
At first I searched for where Monica might sell that much produce. Within twenty minutes I found her name attached to a Saturday community market page.
But I kept thinking about the red light.
So I typed something else into the search bar.
Monica and Daniel.
Then I added their last names and the name of the town where Daniel had grown up.
Most of the results meant nothing.
Then I opened an old photograph from twenty-seven years ago.
I stared at it for several seconds before slowly leaning back in my chair.
My husband hadn’t told me everything.
Not even close.
By noon I was making calls, printing photographs, and gathering what I needed from the garden shed.
A few hours later I was standing in Monica’s front yard, putting the final piece of my plan into place.
Her front door opened.
Monica screamed so loudly that doors began opening all along the street.
She stood frozen on her porch, staring at what I’d arranged across her front yard.
In the center was a large sign I’d made that afternoon.
MONICA’S HARVEST
Underneath, in letters big enough for anyone passing on the street to read, I’d written:
This woman spent years trying to take my husband from me. Now, twelve days after his death, she’s stealing what he left behind.
“What the hell is this?”
“Advertising,” I said. “You wanted to sell the fruit.”
Monica hurried across the lawn and reached for the sign, but I caught the other side before she could pull it down.
“Take this down!”
“Give me my fruit.”
“You’ve lost your mind!”
By then neighbors were gathering along the sidewalk, drawn out by Monica’s scream. She looked around and seemed to realize that tearing everything apart would only attract more attention.
Then her eyes moved from the photograph of the empty trees to the old picture of her and Daniel I’d enlarged that afternoon. Her expression changed.
“You stupid woman.”
