A Hurricane Destroyed My Orange Groves in One Night. The Banker Who Came to Foreclose Ended Up Saving Them

I asked her to stay for dinner. My mother made ropa vieja and interrogated Sophie for two hours about her intentions toward her son.

Sophie passed.

We started seeing each other quietly in the spring, after the loan paperwork was final, because she wanted everything to be clean and proper.

“I’m not going to be the loan officer who dated the borrower,” she said.

“Then what are you going to be?”

“Patient,” she said, and kissed me on the cheek, and drove back to Sarasota.

By summer, she wasn’t the loan officer on my account anymore. She’d asked to be transferred off it.

That night, she came out to the groves. The young trees were knee-high and full of new leaves. Luis had hung strings of lights between the rows for his daughter’s quinceañera the week before and never taken them down.

I put some music on in the truck. Old Cuban songs my grandfather used to play.

Sophie kicked off her shoes, and we danced barefoot in the grass between the orange trees until the stars came out.

The first harvest from the new trees will come in three years. My grandfather’s ten acres produced their best fruit in a decade this winter.

And the ladies at church have finally stopped trying to set me up.

I’m not married to the oranges anymore.

Not exactly.

Would you have taken that risk for a stranger the way Sophie did? Tell me in the comments.