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Because of the vast acreage, it was easy to sneak into the garden without anyone knowing. All the lights were off. Being here under the cover of night, without telling Hart, made Rose feel grimy all over. But she needed to see what Lowell wanted to show her. Either there was something there, or Lowell was blowing things way out of proportion. After tonight, one way or another, Rose would know for sure.

She stood at the entrance to the maze, white-knuckling a flashlight, and when she heard a rustling, she pointed the light forward, straight into Lowell’s eyes. He recoiled, shielding his face with his hand. “Would you put that away?” he hissed. “Someone will see us.”

Rose let the beam of light fall, but she did not turn it off. “Just tell me what this is about.”

Lowell sniffed and tugged on the sleeves of his jacket. “You’ll see soon enough.” He took a step past her, through the maze’s archway, and Rose followed. She swept the light in the space between her and Lowell. But he must’ve had the route down to memory, because he didn’t need a guiding light to show him the way. Long minutes passed where the only sound between them was that of their deliberate footsteps.

When Rose sensed they were halfway through the maze, she finally spoke. “Did you ever get a sample of the dirt, like you said you would?”

“Yes,” Lowell said. With him in front of her, with it being so dark, Rose couldn’t see his face. And though she was close enough to reach out and touch him, his voice sounded like it was coming from somewhere else. As though he was still on the phone with her.

“And?” Rose asked. “Did you get it tested? Was there something horrible in the results?” Lowell didn’t say anything, and the silence stretched thick and heavy. He pulled and pulled on it, until Rose thought she would snap along with it. “Well?”

“It’s just soil,” he finally said.

Rose knew it. Lowell’s theories had amounted to nothing. She was about to say something when he beat her to it. “But have you noticed the flowers?”

Tension settled in the center of Rose’s forehead, her skin furrowing with questions and memories. But she’d already rationalized this. “You can grow flowers in the greenhouse and then transplant them to the garden. It doesn’t matter what season—”

“That’s not what I’m talking about.”

They had reached the door at the center, and Lowell pulled it open, the archway framing the flowers inside. In the darkness, the flowers were drained of their saturated color, but Rose only had to shine her flashlight on them to wash them with vibrance and life. She stepped inside after Lowell, who strolled into the Wish Garden like it was his living room. Rose touched the flowers closest to her, grazing her fingertips along their leaves and petals carefully, not wanting to disturb them too much.

“At first, I thought it was the soil,” Lowell said. “Then, when I realized there was nothing wrong with it, I thought it was the atmosphere. That maybe this spot was the perfect place, with the perfect conditions, to grow just these types of flowers. But that’s not it, either.”

Rose grew antsy. Nothing about this was out of the ordinary. The flowers looked fine, and it wasn’t the soil, so then what was he going on about?

Lowell came to stand next to her, to look at the same flowers she was looking at. “Hydrangeas and lilacs,” he said.

“Been brushing up on your flowers?”

“Yes,” Lowell answered matter-of-factly. He crouched down and motioned for Rose to do the same. When she did, she followed his finger to where it now pointed. Lowell picked through the bramble. “Two different flowers. Growing out of the same shrub.”

Rose leaned in closer. She shone her light into the knot of twigs and leaves. But it was impossible to tell if what he said was true.

“But it’s not the flowers, either,” Lowell continued. “They’re just a neat by-product. All this time I always wondered why the Hargroves have been so blessed. So lucky. Rich and beautiful and perfect. For generations . And now I know why.”

Rose continued to stare at the maze of twigs and stems and leaves, working to catch up to Lowell.

“They built the hedge maze around this specific spot to protect it,” Lowell said. “To keep it away from the outside world. Do you know what they do here?”

“They plant flowers,” Rose said.

Lowell shook his head. “They plant wishes.”

He wasn’t saying anything that Rose didn’t already know. And yet, it sounded like new information. She put the flashlight down, a wide swath of golden light beaming beside her knees.

“When Heather brought me here the first time, she taught me how to do it,” Lowell whispered. “She was so nice. She said she recognized something in me. Something that she used to feel herself. An insecurity. The desire to be better. To be beautiful. She gave me a seed. Do you know what I wished for when I planted it?”

Rose shook her head, even though a part of her already knew what he was going to say.

“I wished to be taller.” In the dark, Lowell’s eyes looked like black onyx, and they sparkled as he spoke. “And then I was.”

“You—you broke your leg,” Rose sputtered.

“A side effect.” He was bursting with the truth of the secret. There was so much wind in his sails that he jumped up, sucked in a deep breath, and walked a small circle around Rose, as though to get his energy out. “Every time you make a wish, whatever you wish for, there’s a side effect. Heather explained it all when she brought me here the first time.”

Rose shook her head. What Lowell was saying wasn’t possible. It sounded like magic . Magic didn’t exist. But try as she might to articulate this, all Rose could do was mutter unintelligible sounds. Syllables that didn’t amount to words.

Lowell kneeled before her once more, leaning toward her so that even though he whispered, his voice came through loud and clear. “I wished for so much more, Rose.” His mouth cracked into a wide, amazed grin. “All my wishes? They came true.”

He didn’t say what his other wishes had been, which prompted Rose to wonder. Her trembling hand found the flashlight again, and she tilted it up, toward Lowell, seeing him up close. The light crawled up his legs, his chest. She stopped it briefly at his neck. Wide as a tree stump. And then the beam hit his face. He didn’t flinch away this time. In the harsh white light, his face shone in a subtle mosaic of blocky shapes and shadows. When he grinned, his cheekbones were so pronounced they jutted up into the undersides of his eyes. And his lips. Both the top one and the bottom were symmetrical in an uncanny way.

Bit by bit, Lowell had wished for physical perfection. While Rose didn’t know what his side effects were, she ventured a guess. Maybe in the process of becoming attractive on the surface, he had become deeply ugly on the inside. So much so that Rose didn’t see what Lowell clearly saw in the mirror. She saw someone grotesque.

And still. After all this, she didn’t believe him. “You’re lying.”

Lowell shook his head. “I’ll prove it to you.” He dug in his pocket and retrieved a packet of seeds. Almost exactly like the one Hart had presented to Rose when he brought her here, except its paper was worn and softened from frequent use. Lowell grabbed Rose by the wrist, his enormous paw too strong for her to rip away from. “I figured out the rules. The big things, they take time, but something small will show up right away.” He twisted her hand over until her palm faced the sky, and then he spilled too many seeds onto it. “Plant a seed,” his low voice rumbled. “Make a wish.”

Rose had heard those same words before. They’d sounded like poetry to her ears, but now they were as horrid as an incantation.

She finally pulled her hand away, the seeds showering down to the ground. Lowell fell back on his butt and laughed, holding his middle and snorting. “Okay, I’ll do it,” he said. “Something you can see immediately.”

He jabbed a brute finger into the soil and buried a seed in the ground. “I wish my hair was bleached.” His eyes flashed up to Rose’s and he smiled like he was posing for a school picture, daring her to keep looking at him. “Are you watching?”

Yes, Rose was watching. There was nothing to see, but then it only took a minute. She first noticed it at his temples, a frosting of white. And then it blazed up the whole side of his head. Lowell couldn’t possibly see it, but he knew. He ran his fingers over his head, tufts of white shooting from between his knuckles. “See!” he said.

Rose scampered back, using her hands to scuttle farther away from him.

“You see!” Lowell laughed so hard tears squeezed out of the corners of his eyes. He laughed so hard he didn’t even notice—or didn’t seem to care—that a line of blood wormed out of his left nostril. The side effect dripped over the Cupid’s bow of his too-plump lips, down into the cleft in his newly square chin.

Rose backed away. Her mouth opened, but no scream came out. When she was far enough from him, she ran.