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5

The first time the Hargrove twins found out about the secret at the center of the hedge maze, it was entirely by accident.

Hart and Heather, by all accounts, led idyllic lives as young children. The Hargrove twins were privileged—rich, precocious, doted on by family and strangers alike—but even though they had access to all manner of toys and entertainment, they were luckiest because they had two things no other children in the world could claim: each other and the garden at Hemlock Hill.

As twins, they’d grown accustomed to shutting others out of their world, but the garden took that aspect of their lives to another level. Their parents might have tried to expand their friendship circle, set up separate playdates, but the twins never wanted to be apart. And anyway, Mr. and Mrs. Hargrove weren’t exactly keen on opening up their home—and especially their garden—to even more pairs of stomping feet and grabby hands than they were already dealing with.

From an outsider’s perspective, Hart and Heather’s world might have seemed small—just the two of them to entertain themselves in the vastness of Hemlock Hill. But to the twins themselves, the garden was an infinite wonderland. The lawn required frequent watering, and the sprinkler system became Heather and Hart’s waterpark. The short boxwood hedges in the Vegetable Garden became the barricades they could duck behind in water balloon wars. The Ares statue at the end of the Stone Arbor became the stern judge in their mock trials. And the woodlands at the edge of the garden rooms became their jungle hideaway where they crash-landed after failed space expeditions.

But the twins eventually grew out of those childhood fantasies, and by the time they were old enough to start middle school, the thing that fascinated them most at Hemlock Hill was the mystery of the hedge maze. It was Hart who found the center first. The only thing he’d been looking for when he entered the maze that day was Heather, but after walking longer and farther than he ever had before, he found someone else instead.

First, there was a rounded hedge wall—an anomaly in a space made up of right angles—and Hart followed it all the way around. And then he came upon a door. On the other side of the wood, he heard a voice. Making as little noise as possible, Hart eased the door ajar. Through the sliver of the opening, he saw his mother kneeling among a spray of flowers.

He went very still. His mother was awash in the brightest sunlight, the flowers so varied and vibrant that they reflected onto her skin and literally colored her. She had her basket with her, the same worn spade and hoe she’d taught Hart how to garden with, and a packet of seeds open in her lap. He watched her plant a seed and he didn’t move, he hardly breathed, because his mother was saying something, and he’d never seen her talk to herself before.

“Just for tonight, I wish to be seen by him.”

Hart didn’t understand what he’d just witnessed, and he puzzled over it long after he left the maze, and all through Heather’s taunting him for losing their hide-and-seek game. He wouldn’t understand it until that night at dinner, when for the first time ever, Mr. Hargrove didn’t bring his newspaper to the table. And maybe Hart wouldn’t have noticed it, had he not already heard his mother’s wish, but he watched as his father could not take his eyes off Hart’s mother. Justin Hargrove looked at Cait Hargrove like she was the only thing in the room.

“I solved the maze,” Hart told Heather the next day. “I found the middle.”

“No, you didn’t.”

But he pushed on, nodding. “There’s a secret in it.”

Heather, who had a proclivity for all things forbidden and especially secret, was suddenly all ears. Hart led the way. They walked through the leafy passageways for so long that Heather sang “The Ants Go Marching” five times before she got tired of it and started complaining that they were lost. But Hart had marked the path on his graph paper, and when they got to the wooden door and opened it, it was the first moment of quiet on the whole trip. Hart had always been more drawn to flowers than Heather was, so to him, the garden in the center of the maze was always going to be a spectacular sight. But he knew it was special by the way Heather took it all in.?

She treaded carefully through the shrubs, the bushes, the trees, touching the flowers lightly, her jaw slack all the while. “How come they never told us about this place?” she whispered, the way you did in holy places.

“They” being their parents, who Hart now regarded as nothing more than adults who kept secrets. You’d think their parents would have relayed the truth to them early and in a responsible way, but it had been agreed upon for generations that the secret of the garden was best kept from the mercurial minds of little children.

“There’s more they never told us.”

Hart explained what he’d seen their mom doing here. The wish.

And after hearing it all, Heather only had one thing to say. “Gimme a break.”

“If you don’t believe me, then try it yourself,” Hart said, holding out a packet of daylily seeds.

Heather grabbed the packet from him and sat down right on the spot. She poked an index finger into the soil and then used that same finger to carefully drag a seed along the inside of the paper packet. Hart watched her and held his breath. He hadn’t tried to make a wish yet himself, not wanting to do anything without his sister. If this didn’t work, he’d definitely look like an idiot. But he was sure of what he’d seen. He knew this would work. And he also knew what Heather would wish for.

She placed the seed in the ground and patted soil down on top of it.

“Dear garden.” Heather let her eyes flutter shut, brought her palms together in a heavenly embrace, and let a sly smile slink across her face. Though she’d never done this before, and she clearly didn’t believe in it, she already had the words and rituals that Hart would never have come up with, and for that alone he was grateful he’d waited to do this with her. “I wish for… a puppy.”

Heather opened her eyes and looked around her, and when she found nothing, she glared up at her brother. “I knew this wouldn’t work.”

Hart let out a breath, but still held on to hope. And he held on to it until the next morning, when he and Heather ran out into the garden and found a perfect golden retriever panting in the middle of the yard.