Want more from Wildflower Ridge?
Read Addie Merck’s complete journal, including entries not included in the novel.
A grieving widow.
A forgotten orchard.
A family secret buried for thirty years.
Two years after her husband’s sudden death, fifty-six-year-old Emerson Haven has perfected the art of staying busy enough not to think too hard about what comes next. Then the company she gave twenty-two years to replaces her with a younger woman and sends Emerson home with her career packed into a cardboard box.
With no job, no plan, and no desire to spend the rest of her life proving she’s still useful, Emerson does something wildly out of character. She sells her Manhattan apartment and buys an abandoned apple orchard in upstate New York without ever seeing it in person.
Wildflower Ridge is not the peaceful refuge the photographs promised. The farmhouse is unsafe, the barn is listing to one side, hundreds of apple trees have gone wild, and Emerson’s new home is a mouse-scented vintage Airstream named Dolores. Before long, she’s also acquired Walden, a wary stray dog who seems to have chosen her, Daisy, a young wanderer who can repair almost anything, neighbors who refuse to let her disappear into solitude, and Greg, a quiet beekeeper who understands that grief doesn’t need to be fixed before life can begin again.
As summer turns toward harvest, Emerson slowly begins restoring the orchard and discovers a journal hidden inside the old cider house wall, written by a woman who once loved and lost on the same land. Addie’s words teach Emerson something she never expected to learn, that sometimes survival isn’t about moving on. Sometimes it’s about staying long enough to see what grows.
Then, two years after his death, Emerson finally opens the box containing the last of her husband’s belongings. What she finds inside rewrites the marriage she thought she knew and reveals a secret that has been waiting decades to reach her. Suddenly, Emerson has to decide whether the life she’s building at Wildflower Ridge can hold the truth about the life she lost.
Set among apple trees, honeybees, vintage trailers, autumn cider pressings, unexpected friendships, and one bear with absolutely no respect for property lines, The Cider House on Wildflower Ridge is a warm, heartfelt later-in-life women’s fiction novel about grief, reinvention, found family, and discovering that a second life doesn’t have to erase the first.
Amazon
Apple
Nook
Kobo
Google Play
At fifty-eight, she's spent her whole life taking care of everyone else. Now it's time to find out what makes her happy.
For thirty-three years, Claire Bellamy has been the perfect wife, mother, and hostess in an affluent Connecticut suburb. She's organized the fundraisers, raised the children, kept a beautiful home, and made certain her husband's life ran smoothly.
Then he leaves her for a woman Claire has welcomed into that very home.
With her marriage in ruins and no idea who she is without it, Claire packs a suitcase and heads for the North Carolina mountains, where the brother she hasn't spoken to in twenty-six years lives on a quiet stretch of land near Wildflower Ridge.
She only plans to stay a week.
But her brother Greg isn't particularly happy to see her, and the charming women at the neighboring orchard have other ideas about how Claire should spend her time. Before long, she's helping restore a vintage trailer, learning the difference between real work boots and expensive ones, and clearing decades of dust from an abandoned honey house.
What begins as a distraction slowly becomes something Claire never expected. A place where she's needed, friendships that don't come with expectations, and the possibility of building a life that's entirely her own.
But the past doesn't disappear just because she's driven away from it. With her marriage still unraveling and old family wounds threatening her fragile new beginning, Claire must decide whether to return to the comfortable life she's always known or take a chance on the one she's only beginning to imagine.
Because sometimes the sweetest years of your life are the ones you never saw coming.
Return to Wildflower Ridge for a heartwarming story of second chances, complicated families, unexpected friendships, and the courage to begin again at any age.