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It’d been lifetimes since Hart had been truly blindsided, but right now, standing in the rain, in the Wish Garden, Heather’s words caught him so off guard they pushed him off-kilter, making him physically stumble back. He was drowning in all the questions swimming through his mind, so he grabbed the first one within reach. “How?”

All of Hart’s visions of a future with Rose were actually memories of a life already lived. Not fantasies, not dreams. He was the only one in the world who remembered all the lives he’d lived with Rose. How could Heather remember them, too?

“After I forgot Mom,” Heather explained, “all I wanted was to remember her again. But the garden never granted me that wish. Because—”

“You can’t undo a wish.” He knew that already. Knew that Heather had planted hundreds of forget-me-nots trying to remember their mother again. But then he recalled what Rose had told him once, in the greenhouse. How she’d overheard Heather wishing to forget. And suddenly, realization hit Hart like whiplash. Maybe it was because they were twins and they were experts at communicating without trading many words, but he knew instantly what she was getting at. With Heather and her vague, unspecific wishes, the garden reciprocated in vague and unspecific ways. When the garden wouldn’t grant Heather her wish to remember their mother, she’d tried a loophole. Maybe she asked to remember everything . And the garden had granted her the ability to remember things no one else in the world could. No one except Hart.

Heather nodded as she saw it all dawning on him. She sighed, and it took all the air out of her, like a flat tire. “When you first turned back time, I thought I was the only one who realized it,” she said. “I thought the world had been reset and I was the only one who knew it. But then I started picking up on things. Like one time I found you reading about Rossetti in your room.”

“Rose’s favorite artist,” Hart said.

Heather nodded. “But Rose wouldn’t even find out about Rossetti until a college art history class. I remember because it was like she went on this total bender where she couldn’t stop talking about him—you know?”

“I know,” Hart said.

“And when I found you studying him—while we were still in high school—I realized what you were trying to do. You knew about everything that made her tick because you’d experienced it all before. You were brushing up on everything she loved so that you could get close to her. Impress her, probably. Make her fall in love with you again.”

Hart shook his head, a sour taste suddenly coating the back of his throat. Heather made it sound so calculating. “It wasn’t like that.”

“That was when I realized that you still remembered your previous life with Rose,” Heather said. “You and I were the only ones who remembered.”

“So you knew,” Hart said. “Every time I brought Rose back.”

“Four lifetimes,” Heather confirmed. “I’ve lived them all with you.”

“Why didn’t you ever say anything?”

Heather tilted her head to the sky, closing her eyes against the rain. “Because I wanted it to work,” she said simply, sadly. “You say I hated Rose, but you know I didn’t, Hart. I wanted her to live. Just as much as you did.”

“So why are you stopping me now?” Hart asked. He couldn’t keep his voice from rising.

“Because she never makes it,” Heather said plainly.

Hart turned away from his sister, unwilling to bear witness to the resolve on her face. She looked so sure of something that just wasn’t true.

“No matter what you do, how many ways you try to avoid it,” Heather said, voice shaky but steady enough to get through to her brother, “Rose always dies.”

Hart squeezed his eyes shut. It wasn’t like he didn’t think about this constantly. Rose’s death destroyed him—every time it happened. And the question of how to stop it from happening plagued him, informed his every decision. Every new life he got with Rose was an opportunity to make her live—to keep her living. Hart would figure out a way to keep Rose alive. The only thing in his way was the person standing before him.

He opened his eyes and locked gazes with Heather. “You’re the reason my wish isn’t working. All this time I’ve been losing my mind trying to figure out why—and it’s you.”

Hart couldn’t stand to see the pity in Heather’s eyes, not when he knew how she really felt. Smug. The same smugness that let her think she had any right to wreck his wishes. Hart had been there for her anytime she needed him. “How could—” Anything he tried to say lodged itself painfully in his throat. “I only wanted this one thing,” he rasped, incredulous. “And you’ve been coming here pulling up my wish every single time I planted it.”

“Hart, you aren’t planting anything,” Heather said carefully. “Don’t you see? All you’re doing is burying .”

“No.”

“Rose keeps dying and you keep burying her over and over again.”

Hart clenched wet fists. “I’m bringing her back to life over and over again!” he roared.

But Heather didn’t back down. “What will make this time different? Hasn’t Rose died enough to make you realize—”

“Stop saying that,” Hart said. “Every time I bring her back, there’s always a chance. There’s always a chance she could live.” He swallowed and wiped his face. “I just need to make the conditions right—”

“She isn’t a flower, Hart! You can’t just make sure the pH in the soil is right, and that she gets enough sun and water and nutrients—”

“I’m not saying that—”

But Heather’s bitter gust of a laugh clipped his words. “That’s your whole problem, Hart. You’re a gardener who hasn’t realized the most basic rule of gardening: Everything that lives will eventually die.”

Hart shook his head, but no matter how much he closed his eyes, how loud he protested, how much he tried to ignore his sister, she wouldn’t let him. He felt her every word seeping into him, as sure as the rain soaking him to the bone.

“Rose’s destiny is to die.”

Heather didn’t understand. She couldn’t just say that, when he’d been able to bring Rose back three times. He’d shared four entire lifetimes with her. “So, what, I’m just supposed to let her go?”

Heather bent her head, her dark, wet hair a shroud shielding part of her face. “I’ve made so many wishes in this garden,” she said, her tone the most even it had been since they’d started this conversation. “Which means I’ve also experienced so many consequences.” She touched the petal of a nearby chrysanthemum with a delicacy Hart had never seen her reserve for a flower. She glanced at her brother, extending that same softness to him. “Maybe that’s why I can see the consequence of your wish in a way that you can’t.”

“What are you talking about?” Hart asked, the rumble of the rain nearly swallowing his voice.

“When you wished for Rose, the first time. You wished for love, didn’t you?” Heather didn’t wait for Hart to say so. His silence was confirmation enough. “What is the consequence of love?”

Nobody understood how the consequences really worked. The closest you could get was to guess the opposite of whatever you’d wished for. And the opposite of love was… The realization struck him slowly, then swiftly, spearing him right through the ribs. The feeling he’d had since his mother died. Since he’d woken up every morning without Rose by his side. The consequence of love was… “Grief.”

Heather nodded, and for the first time, some of the fog lifted. She wasn’t telling him these things with malice in her heart. She was pained by this. “You can’t have Rose without also having grief,” she said.

Hart had never understood it until this very moment. He was too close to it. Couldn’t see the forest for the trees. But now it was so clear.

Rose was gone because he’d wished it that way.

He’d lost her just by the fact of having wished for her. Hart had made the one grave mistake he’d always admonished Heather for: he’d made a wish without thinking about its consequence.

And then his other wish came into focus, in such stark relief that it sank him to the ground, until he was nothing more than a crumpled wet heap seeping into the mud. Heather kneeled next to him, wrapping her arms around him to try and hold him together. But she wasn’t strong enough. He wasn’t strong enough to keep the earth—to keep all his guilt—from swallowing him whole. “My wish to turn back time,” Hart said. His voice so ragged, so tear-clogged, it was hard for even him to recognize it. “The consequence.”

He could feel Heather nod against his back. “Less time with Rose,” she whispered.

How could he not have seen it? How could Hart not have realized why Rose kept dying in every reality, earlier and earlier? He was the one who’d done this to her.

Every time. “I kill her,” Hart said.