Is Under The Lemon Tree Based On A True Story?

In all the eight years after Mamma died, Father hated me. He hated me for causing Mamma’s death, and he hated me even more because I didn’t resemble her at all. So he adopted a girl who looked eighty percent like Mamma and raised her as the principessa of the Vitale family. He brought her to banquets hosted by the five Mafia families of Corholt and seated her beside him at negotiation tables. In front of the entire family, he publicly declared that his adopted daughter, Bianca Vitale, was his only heir. Meanwhile, I wore a servant’s apron and lived in a cellar beneath the estate. He allowed Bianca to break my fingers, slash my face, and lock me inside the morgue freezer. “This is what you deserve.” I believed it, too. Until my sixteenth birthday, when Mamma came back.

The day my wife gave birth to my foster brother's child, my entire family waited tensely outside the delivery room. They were not concerned about whether Sheila Rogers would make it through labor safely. They were worried I might turn up and make a scene. My mother kept glancing at the elevator. "He won't try to come up the stairs, will he?" My father was on the phone with hospital security again and again. "Yes, about six foot three. Have you seen him?" My brother stayed coiled and ready, fists clenched. "If my brother causes trouble, I'll lay down my life to protect Sheila and my son." However, from the start of labor to the moment Sheila delivered safely and both mother and child were declared healthy, I never showed up. Reclining on the hospital bed, Sheila took out her phone and asked my mother to call me. "Tell Hank not to cause any trouble," she said calmly. "If he's willing to be the child's godfather, we can still live our lives together." She felt absolutely no guilt toward me. From her perspective, she had merely granted my parents their long-standing wish for a grandchild. What fault could there possibly be in that? What no one knew was that I had never planned to go to the hospital. At that very moment, I was training beneath the scorching sun. All for a single reason: in one month, I would deploy with my unit to Safrana on a peacekeeping mission. Once I left, there would be little chance of ever coming back.

I've been caught in a relationship with a divorced man for eight years. We've broken up and reconciled too many times to count. In the end, I tallied ninety-four breakups and five divorces between us. One more would make it an even hundred, but I'm too exhausted to continue this cycle. The first breakup happened when I was giving him my virginity. Halfway through, his ex-wife called asking him to pick up some bread, and he simply left. The fifth breakup occurred when he abandoned me, newly pregnant, on the highway to comfort his ex-wife who was having complications with her own pregnancy. I ended up in a car accident and miscarried. He arrived at the hospital with his clothes disheveled. Despite all the pain he caused me, I could never bring myself to truly leave him. Our most recent divorce happened for an equally absurd reason. His ex-wife and their child were participating in a family reality TV show that required them to appear as a complete family unit. To protect his ex-wife's public image, he divorced me yet again. When filming wrapped, he called to discuss remarrying. This time I refused, because I'm going to marry someone else.

"I felt brave enough to accept what was in front of me, they say you only find love once in a lifetime, that everyone has their partner, their half of the orange; it was a miscalculation for me, in my mind there was several possibilities for a person to be compatible with more than one person; but, love? No... love is only felt and has it once, and you know when you have found it, you feel it, there are no doubts and fear is not there's space." Is it possible that love can overcome the barriers of distance? Esther and Benjamim, found each other again, after a long time apart and discovered a reciprocal feeling, dormant in both; but not every love story is like movie romances; and they needed to face their fears, distance, and time, in the name of a love never lived.

Life is hard, but for Delaney Waters, it’s especially harder. From the moment she was born, she was excluded due to the fact that she was born under a black moon, one of the worst moons in werewolf lore. Even Delaney’s mother treats her like everyone else; coldly. On her eighteenth birthday, everything changes unexpectedly for her because she finds her mate and he is none other than Alec Castell, the son of the Alpha. This discovery leads them both down a path from which there is no return, and Delaney, as always, gets the rough end of the stick. A terrible event ruins Delaney’s life indefinitely, turning her into someone callous and bitter, and with a thirst to get back at the world that treated her so cruelly and unfairly. Her quest for vengeance leads to discoveries that shatter her foundations and make her question her entire existence, turning everything she thought she knew about herself on its head. Will she succeed in overcoming her badly-written fate or will the past repeat itself once more?

On the fourth day after our son died, I decided to end my military marriage. Before that, I spent three days taking care of what remained of him. On the first day, I tricked my wife into signing the cremation papers. On the second day, I went to my son's school and collected the textbooks he never had the chance to use. On the third day, I prepared a table full of his favorite dishes and begged my wife to come home so we could celebrate his birthday one last time. She agreed. Then she turned around, claimed she had a mission, and spent the entire night setting off fireworks with her childhood sweetheart. That night, I sat beside my son's memorial photo and ate alone. The next day, she came home looking guilty and handed me a brand new backpack. She said it was a gift for our son to use at school. She did not know that our child would never live to see his first day of school.