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The only sounds came from the crunch beneath their footsteps as they walked the golden gravel path, and the chirping creatures who made their homes in the trees. And always, constantly, the trickling of water from some nearby, unseen fountain. It was astounding how loud it all was, and yet nothing like the clamoring ambient noises of traffic and sirens in New York City.

“So, where are you taking me?” Rose asked. The party had faded to whispers, and then to nothing at all. She couldn’t tell where they’d come from, or where the main house was. She wondered how anyone could navigate this place without a map.

“I wanted to show you something,” Hart said. “It’s through here.”

Walking along a wall that looked straight out of a fairy tale, with bricks and stones of all different sizes, they came upon a perfectly round entry arch. From the top of it, just over their heads, dangled a cross between a wind chime and a mobile. Glazed letters, molded out of clay, hung from the ends of fishing line, with red bells and beads in between them. In the near dark, Rose couldn’t make out if the handmade beads were meant to be flowers or hearts, but she could read what the six letters spelled out. G-A-R-D-E-N.

Rose followed Hart beneath the swaying mobile, stepping into this new garden room. At its center sat a wooden bench built for two, and beside it, a lamppost with what must have been a motion sensor, because it flickered on when they came near it, bathing the two of them in a pool of soft light. As far as Rose could see, dotting every shrub in shades of pinks, whites, and yellows, were flowers. No, not just flowers. Now she knew what the pink shapes in the wind chime were. She turned to Hart. “Roses?”

“It’s corny, I know,” Hart said. “But I thought maybe you’d like to see the Rose Garden.”

There was a neat symmetry to this garden, with beds of roses squared off in every corner of the lawn, grouped according to color. Pastel pinks and yellows to one side and the more vibrant, deeper reds and fuchsias to another. Between each segment, taller roses draped over rounded pergolas, creating leafy tunnels. Everywhere she looked, shrubs spilled over messily, brazenly, with more roses than she’d ever seen before. Rose caressed the blooms, which seemed to reach for her touch as much as she reached for theirs. Some of the roses were delicate, with a single row of petals that came in a gradient of color, going from dusty pink at the center to neon magenta at the frilly tips. Others were so jammed with petals, the number of them seemed infinite.

“Most of these are rambling roses. They’re more pliable than climbers, so you can train them on trellises and over arbors.” Hart gestured toward one such archway. Rose ducked into the flowery tunnel, but Hart did not. She could still see him through the leaves, though, walking parallel to her.

“A lot of rambling roses are going extinct,” Hart went on. “I’m kind of on a mission to keep them alive.”

“So you like roses,” Rose said. “What do you like about them so much?”

Her question was met with a pause, and through the foliage and metal frame of the archway, Rose could see Hart rolling it around in his head.

“Well, there’s the obvious stuff,” he said. “Roses are beautiful. Classic. Refined. But then they’ve got this whole other side of them that sort of counteracts all that. Like, they can grow pretty wild. They’re tough and thorny. You have to be careful with them because of how fragile they can be, but you’d be surprised how much they can withstand, too.”

Rose stepped out of the tunnel, no barrier between her and Hart anymore. She liked hearing him describe a rose. And as his eyes gleamed with a warm playfulness, it was easy to believe that he wasn’t just talking about a flower anymore. “Sorry,” he said. “Rambling about rambling roses.”

Rose bit her lip to keep from smiling. Corny —his own word. But she liked it. She cupped a pale pink bloom in her hands, her thumbs brushing its countless velvety folds, like pushing back the fur on a sheepdog’s face. She tipped her nose to its center and breathed in deep. Musky. Earthy. Like a soothing dark tea. She looked up at Hart and cocked an eyebrow. “Presumptuous of you to bring me here thinking I like roses just because of my name.”

Something like alarm sparked in his eyes. Rose was quick to put it out. “I’m kidding,” she said. “They’re lovely.”

Before she even noticed what he was doing, Hart reached for his holster and took out the gardening tool in it. He used the pruning shears to snip the stem of the rose in her hands. Now it belonged to her.

“So, you’re like a real gardener,” she said.

Hart’s cheek quirked with a smirk. “Derogatory?”

“No, no,” Rose said. “I think it’s really cool.” Which felt like an oversimplification as soon as she said it. All around them, Hart’s handiwork bloomed with vibrant color. A masterpiece come alive.

“I like the order in gardening,” Hart said. “The promise that under the right circumstances, with the right care, I can make anything grow. And I guess I just like to surround myself with beauty.” He looked right at Rose when he said it, and the cynical part of her made the words sound like a pickup line. Something he told every girl he brought to his garden. Lots of them, probably.

How could Rose think anything else? Because as she held the rose in her hands, delicate as a beating heart, and looked up at the boy in front of her, she wondered how someone like him could possibly exist. Hart wasn’t like any other boy she’d met. He wasn’t like the boys out at the party, at least. He was charming and earnest and gorgeous and he had a head full of flowers. Rose needed to make sense of him.

“All the people at the party,” she said, “you’re friends with them?”

Hart shrugged vaguely. “The parties are more Heather’s thing.”

He took a step closer to Rose, like he wanted to distance himself from the party topic and broach a new one. “Can I be honest?” he said. “I like you.”

All Rose could do was stare back at him, unsure what to say.

“And I think you like me, too,” he went on.

On paper, it was the perfect thing to say. On paper, everything about Hart was perfect. But that was also exactly what gnawed at Rose. He was so perfect that she could only surmise that there must be something wrong with him. The cynical part of her—that New Yorker who didn’t make eye contact with people on the street, didn’t know the names of her neighbors, the one who didn’t traipse through magical rose gardens with a beautiful boy—couldn’t believe any of this was real. It must’ve been the garden, she told herself. The otherworldliness of it. The fact that Hart was silhouetted by roses as far as her eyes could see. The near-literal definition of rose-colored glasses. She needed to take them off. She took a step back.

It must have been all over her face. Because Hart, who looked like he’d carefully laid out a table with all the perfect settings, suddenly flushed with mild panic, as if a leg had been kicked out and there was nothing he could do to stop everything from crashing to the ground. “Did I say something wrong?”

Rose heard whispering behind her and turned to find Heather stepping through the circular archway, her hand tugging on Lowell’s like a leash.

“Hi, baby brother,” Heather said to Hart.

“What are you doing here?” he asked.

“What? You think you’re the only one who gets to show off the garden? Me and Lulz are gonna get lost in the maze.”

“Can I talk to you for a second?” Hart said.

Heather pouted but walked off with Hart to a spot out of earshot.

“That’s what she calls me,” Lowell said, flashing Rose an open-mouthed grin. “I’m Lulz .”

“What does she mean, ‘lost in the maze’?” Rose asked.

Lowell’s eyes shimmered with excitement as he whispered, “She’s taking me through the hedge maze!”

Rose didn’t know what Lowell was talking about, but now that he’d mentioned it, she took a closer look at the leafy garden walls, noticing a deeper darkness in one spot of the shrubbery. A perfectly pruned archway in a hedge.

“Hey, don’t wait up for me, okay?” Lowell said. “I’ll find my own way home.”

“What?” Rose asked, still distracted by the maze entrance.

But Heather called for him, and Lowell was already at her side again, tail wagging. She took his hand, then they were swallowed up in the foliage. Hart watched them go wordlessly, hands on his hips.

“There’s a hedge maze here?” Rose asked.

Hart moved his shoulders in a way that didn’t exactly answer her question.

“Can I see it?”

“The sun’s already down,” he said. “It’s not a good idea to go in there in the dark.”

Rose wasn’t sure why, but he’d gone from an open, blooming flower to suddenly closed off, all thorns. Here was the crack in Hart’s perfect facade that Rose had been hunting for. “It’s cool,” she said. She was close enough to him to be able to place the rose he’d cut for her in his hand.

“Wait, where are you going?” he asked.

Boys like Hart didn’t exist outside of storybooks. And if they did, they didn’t fall for girls like Rose. Hart couldn’t have been so different from his twin. “I’m not a good fit,” she said. Not with those people in the party, not with this extravagant life surrounded by acres of beauty. But more to the point, “We’re not a good fit.”

“Wait, hold up,” Hart said. “We are.”

Rose would’ve laughed if she didn’t feel so crummy. “You know, since we met, you haven’t asked me a single question about myself.”

Hart’s eyes clouded with his own doubt. “I haven’t?”

Rose knew she could be insecure. And she knew the cynical part of herself was prone to sabotaging a good thing. But she also knew that when a boy seemed too good to be true, he probably was. “I should go,” she said.

When Rose left, Hart didn’t try to go after her.