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The old Rose, frayed at the edges with doubt and skepticism, would’ve seen it coming. Known that life’s terrain was carved in peaks and valleys, and when it reached the apex of happiness, there was only one direction for it to go. But the way Rose was now, so loved up and full of bliss, there was no way she could’ve imagined that this was exactly the point where everything was about to change.

In the weeks after Hart had shown her the Wish Garden, their feelings for each other only deepened. He’d revealed something to her that he’d kept from everyone else in the world, and now whenever she looked at him, Rose knew she was seeing the whole of him. No more secrets. Only love.

They spent whatever free time they had with each other. After school and on weekend evenings, morning drives, and late-night phone calls. In person, Rose and Hart would talk and not talk, sit and stand, and lie together, whether on grass, or the cracked floor tiles of the greenhouse, or on the eight-hundred-thread-count sheets of Hart’s bed. At school, they were together every moment that their class schedules allowed. At lunch, they sat beneath what had become their tree, every school meal transformed into an alfresco picnic, even as the weather chilled, even as most of their classmates chose the cafeteria instead. Rose went through the motions of homework, classes, and college applications, but they weren’t her main focus.

She didn’t have the words to define it, and the closest thing Rose could compare it to was obsession—always looking at him, thinking about him, reaching for him, and Hart as well, his hand on her back, his whisper in her ear, his lips on her hair. Where once Rose would’ve tried to pin their relationship down with meaning, or analysis, she was too busy living in love to think about it. To ask herself if she and Hart were too in love. If there was such a thing. She took to the relationship like she did to painting. Shutting her mind off and letting emotions dictate her every decision. Loving Hart was a creative process. It was staying up all night and letting art flow out of her, ignoring the hour, not taking a break, seeing only rich color.

If Rose stopped to think, all momentum would be lost. And she couldn’t do that with Hart.

But.

There were things that would occasionally pry into Rose’s peripheral vision, bleeding into her masterpiece. Like one night in Hart’s room, walking past the window and catching a glimpse of something outside that made her stop. In the darkness she saw a figure entering the Rose Garden, and then, presumably, the maze. They were alone and walked with purpose, like this was part of their nightly routine. She couldn’t see their face. But the jacket with the yellow wings was a dead giveaway.

Lowell was a needle. And these days, anytime Rose saw him, she could almost hear the hiss of air leaking out of her life’s bubble. The old Lowell would’ve complained to Rose about the jocks in school. But the new Lowell had joined the football team and counted those same jocks as his friends. The guys who used to tease him about his looks now lost push-up competitions to him in the school parking lot.

Whenever Rose spotted Lowell in the halls at school, he was usually doing something he never would’ve done before, like grabbing girls around the waist and flinging them over his shoulder without warning. Sometimes it was worse: cornering someone smaller than him by the lockers and slapping the books out of their hands. The new Lowell moved through school like a shark in the water, out to chase and trap and devour his next target. Lowell Chamberlain had become someone to avoid. And Rose probably should have. But she decided to confront him when she spotted him shoving a freshman against a locker one morning before first period.

“Lowell!” She was enough of a distraction for the freshman to scuttle away. The new Lowell didn’t wear glasses anymore, and he looked at Rose through a narrowed stare. “Lowell, what are you doing?”

“Mind your business, Rose.”

“This isn’t you.”

Lowell snorted and folded bulky arms over his chest, looking down at Rose. “I thought you said I was perfect. Or did you want me to be perfect like your boyfriend?”

“What are you talking about?”

“You’re too in love to see it. He’s keeping things from you. He lies to you.”

“Lowell,” Rose said, reaching out for him, but he was already on his way down the hall, and it wasn’t like she could hold on to him anyway.

Rose’s confrontation with Lowell left her unsettled, and the feeling followed her into the weekend. The only way she knew to get things back on track was by tying up any other loose ends in her life. And one of those came by way of Mr. Davis.

She scooted her chair closer to his bed at the beginning of her shift, her sketchbook balanced on her knees. “Mr. Davis, did I ever tell you I solved the hedge maze?” Rose said, her voice pitched at the higher end of eager to make up for his sluggish disposition. He seldom sat up in bed anymore, choosing instead to lie back and listen to Rose’s stories instead of telling some of his own. Some days, when she didn’t have too much to do, all she did was sit next to him and draw, not wanting to wear him out by engaging in too much talk.

“Hmm?” Mr. Davis said.

Rose leaned closer so he could hear her better. “I’ll tell you what’s in the center of the hedge maze at Hemlock Hill.”

At this, his eyes opened wide. “What did you see?” he asked, voice low but heavy with wonder.

Rose smiled, happy to put all the speculation to rest. “It’s just a flower garden.”

Mr. Davis blinked. Rose waited for him to say something, to laugh about how anticlimactic it was. Or just to smile back. But the longer he went without saying anything, the worse she felt. Lowell had made a pit form in her stomach, and talking to Mr. Davis was supposed to have chiseled it away. But now she could feel it—larger, coarser—sinking deeper within her.

“What kind of flowers?” Mr. Davis asked. His eyelids drooped. He was falling asleep. More and more on her visits, Rose noticed that he nodded off in the middle of their conversations, growing too tired or weak to continue. Maybe he wanted to be lulled to sleep, and a list of pretty flowers could be the sheep that got him there.

“There were daisies,” Rose began. “And sunflowers, cherry blossom trees. The most beautiful violet tulips.”

Mr. Davis’s brow furrowed. “When did you see this?”

“A few weeks ago.”

“That can’t be right,” he murmured. “Cherry blossoms? Tulips? They’re not in season now.”

Rose picked through all her memories of that day in the Wish Garden. She could’ve sworn she’d seen those flowers. And yet she also knew Mr. Davis was right. Tulips bloomed for a short time, always in the spring, and then just as quickly as they came, they died. Cherry blossoms, too.

“They must’ve been different flowers,” Rose said.

Mr. Davis’s breathing settled into a steady, deep rhythm. But just as Rose thought he’d finally drifted off to sleep, he spoke up again. “Now I remember.” His eyebrows rose over closed eyes. “There was someone once who’d seen the center of the labyrinth and told about it. He’d also seen impossible things.”

For the first time in a long time, Rose went straight home after work. In her room, she sat on her bed with her phone in her hand, staring at her frequent contacts. There were only three names on the list, and her thumb hovered between Hart’s name and Lowell’s.

She lingered on whose name to press, until, finally, she chose one.

When he answered, his voice was so deep. Almost bottomless. “Hello?”

“You were wrong about Hart.” Maybe Rose should’ve started with a hello, too. Maybe she should have confirmed it was Lowell, because he sounded so unlike himself. Then again, she didn’t know this new Lowell. “You’re wrong about Hart, just like you were wrong about the garden,” Rose went on. “He showed me what’s at the center of the maze. He explained why it’s special.”

Though there were miles and cell towers between them, Lowell’s rumble of a laugh crackled so intimately in Rose’s ear, it felt almost like he was standing on her shoulder. A devil. “No, he didn’t,” Lowell said.

The phone call was meant to assuage Rose’s anxieties. They’d been churning since the night she’d seen Lowell sneaking into the garden—a messy black and yellow smear across her perfect canvas.

“If Hart had shown you the real secret of the garden,” Lowell continued, his words eerily low and buzzing with static, “you wouldn’t be this calm.”

Lowell’s words were a knife, slowly slicing into her middle. Rose’s first instinct was to get off the phone. But nothing sowed seeds like doubt. And instead of hanging up, she listened to Lowell’s disembodied voice, and grabbed the hilt of his words, helping the slow knife along. “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she said. It was impossible to tell, even to her own ears, whether this was meant to shut Lowell up, or prompt him to explain.

“Meet me at the hedge maze at midnight,” Lowell said. “Don’t tell Hart you’re coming.”

He hung up.