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Hart never thought he’d come to hate the sound a shovel made when it pierced dirt. Until now.

He stamped his boot on the shovel’s step, digging its tip deeper into the ground. The spot beneath the elm tree was his only choice, really. It was the only plot of land in the Wish Garden unencumbered with flowers and big enough for the size of the hole he needed. It hadn’t taken Hart too long to dig, because he wasn’t going that deep. A couple of feet, max. And with every mound of dirt he scooped off to the side, Hart reminded himself that in the long run, none of this really mattered. He didn’t have to consider what would happen to a body decomposing under a thin layer of earth, because when his wish eventually came true, this grave wouldn’t exist anymore. But Lowell would .

By the time Hart was done, sweat dampened his thermal shirt. He tossed his shovel to the side and wiped his forehead with the back of his wrist. This whole time he’d managed to avoid looking at the new cluster of bamboo, and what it held embedded in its shoots. But he couldn’t do that any longer. He turned around, his chest heaving with all the breath the digging had knocked out of him. And he stared at the body suspended in the plant. Even though Hart had finally looked, there was plenty still for him to avoid. He didn’t have to think about the dead boy in his garden if he instead focused on the logistics of cutting him down.

The rules were clear: Leave the healthy plants untouched unless you wanted a fate like Lowell’s. Like poor Nothing’s. The Wish Garden didn’t respond very well to having its crop destroyed, but there were two ways to tend to the grounds. You could pull up a plant, roots and all, without maiming it. Or you could trim plants that had spent flowers or stalks.

There wasn’t any way for Hart to pull up the bamboo whole. Its roots were too wild and far-reaching. But he was pretty sure that impaling a person meant the plant was now spent. The shoots that went through Lowell already looked pale and browning next to the green shoots beside them. Hart grabbed his lopper tool and kneeled at the base of the cluster. He closed his eyes and made a silent prayer that the garden wouldn’t kill him for trying to cut one of its plants down.

He snipped, waited a second, then opened his eyes. He was still alive. And it was going to take a lot more snips to get Lowell down.

If Hart thought about it too long, he’d say it was beginning to feel like death had pulled up a chair and was making itself quite comfortable in his life. But despite this fact—or maybe because of it—he had found ingenious ways to avoid having to face it head-on.

When his mother died, he’d found something that would give his life meaning again: love.

And then when his love died, Hart found that there was something that could give him purpose: obsession. Drive. The singular focus to do everything he could to get that love back.

And now that death had come to lay itself at his feet, freshly buried under the elm, Hart realized that there was still more to keep him from having to sit with the unimaginable horror of this reality. He refused to see this as him burying a body and chose to see it instead as a promise. He would not let Lowell’s death be in vain. In fact, Hart started to think of it as a sacrifice. He’d never buried a body in the Wish Garden before. Maybe it was just the thing the garden required in exchange for Hart’s wish.

He got on his knees, at the spot where he usually planted his wish for Rose, and glanced over at the fresh mound a few yards away, beneath the elm tree.

“I’ll save you, Lowell,” he whispered. “I’ll make it so you and Rose never meet. You’ll never know about this garden. You won’t ruin yourself.” He took a shuddering breath and planted his rose seed. “I wish to go back to the moment I met Rose.”