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Hart blinked his eyes open and saw that he was alone in his teenage bedroom, in the dark, in the middle of the night. Without Rose. In his waking moments, he refused to think of the future he could’ve had with Rose. But in sleep, these thoughts invaded his dreams, forcing him to face his greatest loss: a life without her. Outside his window, thunder clapped, but he couldn’t say for certain that it wasn’t the sound of his heart breaking in half.

He held on to his head to keep it from spinning, and held on to the memory of his dream, when he’d been here in this house, with Rose. He swung his legs over the side of the bed, pushing through a sudden onset of nausea roiling in his belly.

This couldn’t keep happening. His wish was supposed to have worked by now. There’d been a trade. The garden took Lowell, and now Hart was entitled to have Rose back. That was the way this was supposed to work.

But he was back to his awful reality and dizzy with grief. He ripped open the door to his bedroom and tore through the house until he was in the backyard, instantly soaked in the downpour. He would find out why his wish wasn’t working. He would not leave the garden until it did. He’d sleep there. He’d die there if he had to.

Hart stalked through the rain, ferocity and determination propelling him forward. At the hedge maze, he climbed over and through the hacked walls, taking the new shortcut to the center. But a few steps from the entrance to the Wish Garden, through a slashed pocket of newly opened space, he saw a flash of movement. A girl’s arm. Long hair wet with rain. He stopped, his rage flushing out of him with a drop of new hope.

“Rose?” he whispered.

He took slow, furtive steps into the garden. But because the walls protecting it had been hacked apart, Hart didn’t have to step through the entrance to see all of it clearly. And with most of him shielded behind a wall of foliage, he peeked inside and saw that it wasn’t Rose in the Wish Garden. It was Heather.

It wasn’t hard to stay hidden and quiet with the rain pounding the earth. And Hart wanted to stay hidden, because he got the sense it was the only way to truly know what Heather was doing here. She was pointing her phone’s flashlight at the ground, rain cutting through the beam of light, the drops illuminated like welding sparks.

Hart pushed his hair back and wiped the rain from his eyes, searching the ground for the same thing Heather was. His gaze followed the swish of the flashlight beam until it caught on something and stopped. And when he saw what it was, his eyes lit up.

There, in the mound of dirt where he’d planted his rose seed, was a sprout. Smaller than a pinky finger, but undeniable. A green stem, the start of a new leaf. For the first time since Rose had died, the corners of Hart’s lips pulled up. The feeling was so foreign to him that he didn’t realize he was smiling, but he felt a lightness inside him, rising from deep in his gut and flooding his chest.

The seed he’d planted had sprouted. His wish was going to work. He was going to get Rose back.

Heather clicked the flashlight off. It took Hart a moment for his eyes to adjust, but he could still see her dark figure, the length of her arm reaching down, her thin fingers wrapping around the sprout, and then carefully yanking it, roots and all, out of the dirt.