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The Wish Garden had messed Heather up in myriad ways, but it really got bad once she found her mother’s body. After, she told Hart how it happened. She’d come home from school before him that day. She’d gone into the kitchen looking for something to eat and had spent some time on her phone, scrolling through random videos. Her mom would usually meet Heather in the kitchen around then, but not that day. It wasn’t until Heather got to the bottom of her bag of pretzels that she wondered where her mother was.

Logic told her that her mom was probably out running errands, or pulling weeds in the garden. But Heather’s instincts told her that wasn’t right. So, she went looking.

“Mom?” Heather called, stepping into the living room. Nothing was turned on when it shouldn’t have been, and nothing was out of place. The house, always echoing with silence, seemed impossibly quieter that day. So quiet that it accentuated the sound of Heather’s pulse, its beat rising steadily. Back in the kitchen, she opened the glass door and scanned the garden. Her mother was almost always there if she wasn’t inside, but Heather couldn’t explain why she didn’t go out to look for her.

Heather found her in the laundry room. She saw her mother’s feet first, then the rest of her, lying lifeless on the floor. Heather told Hart that she’d never get over the fact that she’d finished an entire snack standing in the kitchen while their mother lay dead a few feet away.

Losing a mother was hard enough, but finding her body was something that changed Heather in irrevocable ways. Hart tried to be there for his sister, but there was nothing he could do to protect her from that moment. He couldn’t remember when he’d said it—those somber nights all bled together—but he knew his words had triggered something in Heather. “I wish it was me who’d found her,” he’d said.

“If wishes were fishes,” she’d responded. It was the beginning of an old rhyme their mother used to say. But Hart could see the gears turning in Heather’s head, could see the way her eyes came alive for the first time since she’d gazed upon their mother on the laundry room floor.

“Heather,” Hart said. He took her hands in his, and where once that would have been comforting, now he held them firmly, a stern warning. “You need to quit making wishes. You saw what they did to Mom.”

In her later years, Cait Hargrove had become addicted to wish-making. Heather was her mother’s daughter in that way. The twins had overheard their mother’s wishes. Every time she was in the Wish Garden, she prayed to be younger, the only way she knew to fight back against a husband who cheated on her with increasingly younger women. Until the consequence of her wishes kept her young forever.

But Heather squirmed free of Hart’s grip, unwilling to heed his warning.

An invisible line had been drawn that day, one that divided things into the time before Heather’s wish and the time after. When Heather walked into Hart’s bedroom the next night, just a month after their mother had died, he didn’t know what his sister had wished for, but he knew she’d wished for something. He could almost see it on her, like a dark cloud forming overhead.

He could see that this wish had changed everything.

Hart had been sitting at his desk, trying and failing to start an essay, when Heather knocked and then proceeded to enter his room. She’d spent so much of the last month careening between weeping and being catatonic. But tonight, with fingers that couldn’t seem to stop fidgeting with her sleeves, and teeth that tugged nervously on her lower lip, Hart saw a new emotion come over her. Anyone else might’ve said she was still deep in grief. But this was different. Heather looked haunted.

“What’s wrong?” Hart asked.

Heather came to sit on the edge of his bed, and Hart rolled over to her in his swivel chair, facing her full-on and dipping his head to try and catch her downcast gaze. “What is it?” he said, trying to tamp down the dread that was starting to crawl up his spine.

Finally, Heather looked up at him. Hart saw that she wasn’t just spooked. She was dazed. Lost. He knew that look well. He knew what she was going to say before she even said it. “You made a wish.”

Heather nodded. A tear flowed down her cheek, but she didn’t seem to feel it. “I just wanted to forget that I found her.” Her voice came out so thin, wispy as a mourning veil.

For once, Hart wasn’t ambivalent about his sister messing with the Wish Garden. Maybe it would help her get out of the fugue state she’d been in since she found their mom. The whole last month Heather had been stuck in tar, in a darkness so thick Hart didn’t think she’d be able to get out of it by herself. “Did it work?” he whispered, letting himself cautiously hope. “Do you remember finding Mom?”

“I can’t remember finding her,” she answered. This was good news. This was what Heather wanted. But Hart still only saw that dazed glassiness in her eyes. “Hart,” she said, his name a stab of pain. “I can’t remember Mom at all.”

The Wish Garden had messed Heather up in myriad ways, throughout so many moments of her life. But especially after she’d wished to forget her mother. It was an accident, of course. She probably hadn’t been specific enough with her wish, and Hart tried to gauge if there was some mistake, because it couldn’t be all memories of their mother. That was impossible.

But as Heather sat in Hart’s room that night, her voice strained with the effort not to scream as she explained it to him. “It’s like I keep reaching for a memory, anything—what she sounded like, what her smile looked like, and I can’t—I can’t—I—” Heather’s words tumbled out in an urgent chant, becoming sounds, becoming hyperventilated breaths.

And instead of pulling Heather into a hug, trying to calm her down, Hart sat back in his chair. The garden’s powers, like invasive vines, had snaked through the vestiges of Heather’s rational mind, insidious and exacting. Ruthlessly taking the only part of their mom that Heather had left. She’d finally done it. She’d gone too far with her wishes.

“Was it worth it?” Hart asked.

What she’d needed was another shoulder to cry on. But Hart’s question was more of a vise around Heather’s throat, squeezing the air out of her. She locked eyes with him, unable to draw breath, and then she jolted up on shaky legs and slammed through his door.

Hart felt bad about what he’d said, it’d been thoughtless, but he was genuinely curious. Was it better now, for Heather? With their mom gone from her mind, did that mean she wasn’t grieving anymore? Wasn’t submerged in a world of hurt, the waves of pain crashing every waking second?

Was it worth getting rid of every memory of someone if it meant getting rid of the pain, too? He knew the answer the second the question had entered his mind. Of course it wasn’t worth it. The evidence was right there, every day, as Heather wished for dumb, superficial thrills to try to blot out the pain that still racked her. And it was why, two months later, Hart didn’t wish to rid memories of his mother from his mind. He didn’t want to purge any of his thoughts or memories or feelings. Exactly the opposite. He wanted to feel more. He wished for love to come into his life.

Heather never talked about her new wishes with Hart, and he understood why—he’d said the wrong thing that night, thereby taking a cleaver to his bond with his twin sister. But every once in a while he’d spy Heather in the Wish Garden, planting forget-me-nots and muttering the same words over and over again. “I wish I could remember.”

The Wish Garden had messed Heather up in myriad ways, and it was the only explanation for what Hart was witnessing now. Heather crouched to pat down the wet mud, making the dirt appear untouched. It was that detail that disgusted him most.

His wish hadn’t been too big. And Lowell had never disturbed it. It was Heather, uprooting his wishes and covering her tracks.

Hart stepped out of the shadows, holding back the roaring urge to tear the seedling from Heather’s hand and replant it quickly, pretending everything else was a nasty mistake. But he needed an explanation. He needed to understand how his own twin sister could possibly hate him—hate Rose —so much that she’d keep her from coming back to life.

Heather noticed his movement and turned her phone’s flashlight back on, shining it at her brother’s face. Hart didn’t flinch. “What is that?” he asked.

Heather glanced at her hand—at what was in her hand—but said nothing. Only parted her lips, letting droplets of rainwater trail a path from the dip in her perfect, wished-for upper lip into her mouth.

Hart answered for her. “It’s my wish.”

Heather tossed the limp sprout aside like dreck cleared from a gutter. “ Was your wish.”

It took him a moment to respond, not sure if he’d heard her right with the downpour, and the roar of his pulse in between his ears. Hart gave Heather the benefit of the doubt. His rational mind told him that his twin wouldn’t say something so callous.

“You think the garden is too dangerous, is that it?” he asked, ready to explain this away. “You don’t want me to go through what you went through after Mom.” It was the only way to make sense of what Heather was doing. “Nothing bad’s going to happen to me, okay, H? You need to let me do this.”

“Maybe you should make the same wish I did.” Heather’s hand was still muddy, and she wiped the residue on the sides of her soaked pants. “If you just forgot Rose existed, it would make our lives so much easier.”

Hart blinked through the rain, grasping for reasoning. “How can you say that?” he asked, his voice so low it got drowned out in the downpour. “How can you say you wish I’d forget her?” His guts knotted with an ache so big it made his knees buckle, his shoulders slump. “I know the garden’s messed with your mind, but has it also wrecked your…” He pressed a fist in the middle of his chest, twisting the wet fabric. “Why do you hate Rose so much?”

He stalked forward, into Heather’s loaded silence. Her phone’s flashlight beam bobbed on the ground, but he didn’t need it to see every detail of her face, the rain washing it clean. “You used to love her!” he cried. “You used to sit for her paintings, you were her Girl in the Heather !” Tears and spittle trickled out of him, mixing with the rain. He didn’t care that he probably looked maniacal right now. That he sounded deranged. He needed to get it out. Even if he was the only one in the world to understand. “You were so proud when you showed that painting to L—”

“Luca,” Heather finished. “I remember.”

Hart swiped his hands over his face, clearing his eyes of the tears and raindrops, but unable to clear his mind. He replayed what Heather had just said, but it still didn’t make any sense. “What?”

“The day you two met Luca, when we had brunch in the dining room. I showed him Girl in the Heather .”

Hart tried very hard to take in a breath, but though he kept inhaling, no air made it to his lungs. His eyelids fluttered, blinking, squinting, full-on glitching. “How do you know that?” he asked, his voice a wretched whisper.

Heather stepped up to him, leaned in, and got so close that she blotted the rest of the world out. “Because I remember,” she said. “I’ve been there for every life you’ve had with Rose. And I remember every time she died.”