The Cider House on Wildflower Ridge - Second Life, #1

A grieving widow.
A forgotten orchard.
A family secret waiting to be found.

Two years after losing her husband, fifty-six-year-old Emerson Haven has become very good at staying busy enough to avoid the silences. She poured herself into the corporate career that carried her through the worst of her grief, until the company replaces her with a woman half her age and sends Emerson home with her corporate life packed into a cardboard box.

With no job, no plan, and no desire to spend another decade proving she's still useful, Emerson does the most reckless thing she's ever done. She buys an abandoned apple orchard in upstate New York based on a handful of hopeful photos and the fragile promise of a fresh start.

Wildflower Ridge is not quite the peaceful refuge she imagined. The farmhouse is uninhabitable, the barn leans alarmingly, eight hundred apple trees have gone wild, and her new home is a mouse-scented vintage Airstream named Dolores. Before long, Emerson has also acquired a suspicious stray dog, a young mechanic who can repair almost anything, an elderly couple who refuse to let her eat alone, and a quiet beekeeper who seems to understand that some wounds shouldn't be hurried.

As Emerson learns the stubborn rhythms of the orchard, she discovers an old journal hidden inside the wall and begins to understand that starting over may require more than a change of scenery. Then she finally opens the box of her husband's belongings. What she finds inside rewrites the marriage she thought she understood, and reveals a family secret that may change the rest of her life.

Set among apple trees, honeybees, summer storms, vintage trailers, and one notoriously ill-behaved bear, The Cider House on Wildflower Ridge is a heartfelt later-in-life women's fiction novel about grief, reinvention, unexpected family, and the courage it takes to build a future from the pieces no one thought could be saved.