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Hart woke up. When he saw where he was—his bedroom in Connecticut—a black hole opened up where his heart should’ve been, threatening to swallow him whole. The sound that came out of him wasn’t a scream so much as a howl: a long, desperate cry that ripped out of him unbidden.

He clambered out of bed and trudged through the house, his only sense of time coming from the purple outside the windows, signaling the beginnings of dawn. When he walked through the French doors, the chill in the air instantly drew goose bumps on his arms. The morning mist was so thick it looked like a fire had ravaged the place, leaving only smoke and ash, but he didn’t need to see where he was going in order to get there. His bare feet knew the way to the center of the hedge maze.

Hart stood at the spot where he’d planted his rose seed. There should’ve been a sprout there, anything, but there was only the slightly raised mound of earth. He dropped to his knees and bent forward, so far that his forehead pressed into the dirt in an inelegant bow. “Why won’t you work?” He pressed his face deep enough that his words tasted like earth. “Why won’t you work?”

He didn’t know how long he stayed in that position. Only that when he eventually sat upright again, wiping specks of soil from his brow, pale lavender stained the sky. And when he looked around him, his failed wish wasn’t the only abnormality he noticed. Some of the grass looked flat, like it’d been trampled; the soil seemed clumpy in spots, as though someone had disturbed it; and at the base of the juniper tree, there was a hole about the width of a melon and a foot deep, dug messily by hand, not with tools.

It didn’t make any sense. Hart and Heather were the only ones who came in here, and they knew how to properly dig a hole. And then it struck Hart, like a slap across his face, that he and his sister were not the only people who knew about the Wish Garden.

He sprang up and ran, the soles of his feet stamping on grass, crunching gravel, and slapping slippery stepping stones until he got to the stone terrace at the back of the house, where his sister stood, smoking, as she was wont to do whenever she couldn’t sleep. Heather pulled the joint from her mouth and exhaled a plume of smoke, her eyes roving over the length of Hart. “You’re in your underwear,” she said flatly.

Hart gulped in air, catching his breath. “That party that was being thrown for Lowell, did that happen yet?”

Heather shook her head. “It’s this weekend.”

Hart swallowed down the ball of adrenaline in his throat. The explanation for why his wish refused to bloom—it wasn’t because he’d been doing it wrong. It was because someone was messing with the garden. Maybe Lowell hadn’t run away. Maybe he was in hiding, sneaking into the Wish Garden whenever he could. Hart knew from family lore that sort of thing was prone to happen. Some lucky person would get a taste of the wish-granting machine and keep coming back for more. If the party in his honor lured Lowell back to the real world, then Hart would be there waiting for him.