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The first time Hart met Rose was always at the gas station store.

When he’d wished for love, he thought maybe it would come in the abstract shape of a feeling. An intangible lightness in his chest. An unquantifiable reason for being. But the day after he’d made his wish, he walked into the convenience store, the bell jangling overhead like an alarm stirring his soul, and he saw love personified. A vision in pink hair, silhouetted by the cold fog billowing out of the open fridge door. That was all it took for Hart to feel the swish of an invisible arrow piercing his heart. That first time, when she turned around and they locked eyes, he didn’t know her name but he knew who she was. Love. And he also knew that the garden had sent her to him.

Eventually, she tore her gaze from him and grabbed a drink from the fridge without really looking at it, then took it to the front of the store. Rose glanced at Hart a couple more times, but she left without saying a word to him. In fact, they didn’t talk for months, mostly because she had no idea who he was, but also because Hart had been way too nervous to approach her.

They didn’t speak to each other until one day after school, when Hart had stayed late to study in the library. He’d left through the back door and accidentally stepped on a backdrop laid flat on the concrete. A backdrop that was still wet because Rose was in the middle of painting it.

“Oh no,” Hart said, stumbling back, checking the bottom of his shoe for fresh paint.

Rose froze, crouched on the ground with a paintbrush in her hand. She’d been working on a backdrop for the school’s fall production of Bye Bye Birdie . “Don’t mind me,” she muttered.

Hart flushed the same color as her hair. “I’m sorry.”

She plopped the brush in the paint can and stood, wiping the back of her hand on her forehead as she surveyed the damage. “You smeared the courthouse steps,” she said.

Hart nodded. “But you can just touch it up, right?”

She narrowed her gaze at him for a full minute, and in that minute Hart could tell just how long and hard she’d been working on this one minuscule detail in the corner of this backdrop. “Can’t you just watch where you’re going?” she countered.

Hart clamped his lips together and let his eyebrows rise up. “Uh, I apologized.”

“Doesn’t do me much good,” Rose mumbled under her breath.

Under normal circumstances, this sort of interaction would be the first and last time they’d talk. He’d pissed her off, and she didn’t seem to like him right off the bat, and Hart didn’t see how any sort of friendship or relationship could be built from that. Under normal circumstances he would’ve gotten out of her way, like she clearly wanted. But the whole time, his heart kept pounding against his ribs, that same increasing rhythm from when he’d first laid eyes on her at the gas station store. And this time he wasn’t going to let months go by without a word.

“Can I buy you a coffee? To make it up to you?” he asked.

She watched him with so much unconcealed skepticism that before she could turn him down, Hart amended his words. “Or, I could just get you something from the vending machine. We have one of those, in the sports wing. Have you been there? I mean, you’re new, right?” He suddenly had so many questions for her. He wanted to know everything about who she was, and where she’d come from and why. Though he was getting ahead of himself. Best to start with something easy first. “What’s your name?”

“Rose,” she said.

“Hi, Rose. I’m Hart.”

One of her eyebrows quirked almost imperceptibly. “As in…” She drew a hand to her chest, gesturing vaguely to the center of it.

Hart let out a small laugh, an amused exhalation of the breath he’d been holding. Everyone in Meadow Falls knew who he was, so it had been forever since he’d had to spell his name out for someone. “H-A-R-T.”

The gas station store, the second time.

Hart swung open the door so hard, the bell got knocked off its hook and crashed onto the floor. The sound made Rose jump, and made Steve behind the counter yell, “ What the hell, Hart? ”

But Hart didn’t hear him. He was too preoccupied taking the longest, quickest strides to Rose, until his arms were around her, his face buried in her hair, the smoky cold air from the fridge door—propped open by his shoulder now—drying the tears spilling down his cheeks. “You’re back.” His voice was muffled by pink, and flooded with astonishment.

Rose had died. Only four years after she and Hart had gotten married. And now she was alive again. It was the first time he wished to turn back time, and it was the first time his wish had worked.

But after a surprised moment, Rose squirmed out of Hart’s embrace, pushing her palms against his chest. “Do I know you?” she asked.

Hart stared, eyes glassy, mouth open. He knew what he must’ve looked like to her. A deranged stranger who’d just crossed a million personal boundaries and practically assaulted her. He took a step back and swiped a fist along the top of his cheek, trying to wick away the wetness there. He put on a meager smile to show her he wasn’t anyone she needed to be afraid of. And only allowed himself a second to be heartbroken by the fact that she didn’t remember him. “I’m sorry,” he said. “No, no, you don’t know me. That was weird, I’m sorry.”

Rose let out a trickle of laughter, a hint of nervousness in it. “Totally fine,” she said, though she took a step to the side.

“I thought you were…” The excuse he’d come up with was dumb, but it was already halfway out of his mouth, so he just went with it anyway and hoped for the best. “I confused you for somebody else.”

Rose nodded, slow and skeptical. “Lot of girls that look like me around here?”

Hart nodded. “Something like that.” And for good measure added again, “I’m sorry.”

He could feel a stirring in his chest. But unlike the first time he’d met Rose, when it raced with love, now Hart’s heart pounded with astonishment. A day ago he had been grieving Rose’s death, and now he was looking at her, in the flesh. And they were teenagers. Hart couldn’t believe he was seeing her again. Couldn’t believe his wish had worked. And to be honest, couldn’t believe how much younger he felt. It was like drowning in pitch black and suddenly someone had turned on the lights. He needed a moment for his senses to acclimate to the situation.

Hart took a deep breath. They were back to the beginning, so he decided to start with something easy. “My name is Hart.”

“As in…?” Rose pointed to her heart, and Hart’s eyes went wide, threatening to fill up with tears again.

He covered it up with a laugh. A genuine laugh at the wonder of this life. New life. But he kept the tears at bay. There was nothing to cry about. So what if he had to redo their whole life together? He’d redo it a million times over again.

Hart had his Rose back.

The gas station store, the third time.

Hart stayed standing in the doorframe, long after the bell had stopped chiming. Rose faced the rows of drinks, surrounded by the cold mist of the open door. He stared at her so long that a customer trying to get inside had to tap him on the shoulder after his increasingly brusque Excuse me ’s went unheard.

Hart snapped out of his reverie and noticed the guy for the first time. He stepped out of his way. When he turned to Rose again she was watching him, pressing a cold can of Coke to the side of her neck. Hart didn’t run up and hug her this time—he’d learned that lesson already. But he held back for another reason. Fear seized him around the neck.

The way it went, Hart had managed to turn back time and gotten another chance at life with her. He’d gotten his wish. He’d gotten his Rose back. But she’d died. Again. Just a week after getting engaged, and in a distant part of his brain, behind a door he did not want to open, was the undeniable fact of this abnormality. He’d lived two lifetimes with his soulmate, and both times she’d died instantly in accidents that he could not see coming and could not prevent.

Hart was rattled. That distant part of his brain whispered that it couldn’t have possibly been a coincidence. But standing in that gas station store for the third time, and seeing Rose alive and in the flesh, made him keep that thought behind the door, locked away for good.

He’d lived his second chance with her too flippantly when he should have been protecting her. He’d lived like he’d forgotten it was a second chance, but this time he wouldn’t. This time he would protect her, treat her like she was made of glass. Which meant he would take time to consider, to look at all angles, to wait before diving into things. Hart took a slow step forward, toward Rose.

The gas station store, the fourth time.

Days before, just short of graduating college, Rose had died. Today, Hart wasn’t going to waste a second. Life was precious. Every moment counted. And as soon as he saw Rose by the fridges, he was flooded with both relief and a desperate sense of urgency. He needed to find a way to talk to her—to be physically close to her. He couldn’t wait months and he couldn’t scare her away. So he devised a plan to bump into her, spill his slushie (cherry if he liked her—she’d revealed that thought process to him in a past lifetime). Hart needed to make a splash. Instant contact and a big mess. The bigger the better.

On the last day of Rose’s fourth life, when she’d asked Hart if his wish had ripped her out of her life in New York City on a whim, he knew the answer was yes.

Rose and Hart were always meant to be together, but it was his impatient, desperate, lovelorn wish that brought her to him, expediting the destiny process. Had Hart not made the wish, he could only guess at how he would have eventually met Rose. It could have been in their thirties. Maybe their fifties. Though Hart suspected it would’ve happened on a trip Rose made to visit her dad. Hart never would have left Hemlock Hill. He never would have gone to New York. He would have stayed and tended to the garden. But Rose’s dad would’ve still divorced his wife, and he would have probably still moved back home to Connecticut. Maybe Rose would’ve come to visit her father during the holidays, in her twenties. Maybe she would’ve made a run to the hardware store after her dad had neglected to fix something at his house. Maybe she would’ve bumped into Hart in the store’s garden center. He wouldn’t have needed a wish. Hart would’ve known it was love right then and there.

He thought about that a lot. But the thought often snuck up on him, unbidden. And unwelcome. He didn’t like to think of what could’ve been, and all the heartache that would’ve been saved had he not made his first wish.

Instead, Hart focused on what had already come to pass. The future he was desperate to get back to.