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It was the telltale sign of a guilty conscience that Hart waited until the murky hours between night and day to do this. He didn’t grab any shoes, because he wanted to make the least amount of noise. He padded through the halls of the house, slipped out the glass doors, and finally stepped onto the icy blades of grass, which cooled his soles.

Hart knew this small corner of the world better than any other place, and he did not need a flashlight to navigate it in the dark. But it wasn’t until he arrived at the greenhouse that he realized he should’ve brought a light anyway. Without a light he might bump into something, knock a terra-cotta pot off a shelf and smash it to pieces. He wondered how loud it could get and glanced over his shoulder to the sleeping giant that was the Hargrove house, making sure none of its windows glowed with life.

But the real reason Hart should’ve thought to bring a flashlight was so it could help him find what he came here for: seeds. It’d been stupid of him to let Heather hide them. He took careful steps down the narrow pathway and reached out, feeling for the lantern tucked in the corner of the workbench. He flicked the switch and it blinked to life. And because the entire surface of this place was made of glass, the greenhouse blazed with light, flashing as bright as a firefly in the night. It was a risk, shining attention on this spot of the garden, but it was the only way for him to find the seeds he’d kept hidden. The ones Heather didn’t know about.

Hart opened the metal storage locker at the end of the small space and reached over the top shelf. His fingers skimmed the surface until they settled on a waxy canvas mound. The roll-up pouch was gray, and Hart couldn’t remember if that was its original color or if it’d just aged, hidden away so long. He set it down on the table and made quick work of untying the twine around its center and unfurling it. Rows of five pockets lined each side, ten in all, meant to keep short-handled gardening tools secure. But there weren’t any trowels or cultivators or forks here. The pouch was where Hart kept random knickknacks he didn’t have a day-to-day use for. A ball of twine. A wooden plant marker. A gardening glove missing its match.

Fishing two fingers into the final pocket, Hart pinched the smooth sides of a folded paper envelope and took it out to find a seed packet. He held his breath as he inspected it. SWEET VIOLETS .

“What are you doing?”

Hart nearly dropped the seeds at the sound of her voice. Heather stood at the greenhouse door, wearing checkered pajama pants that pooled around her shoes and a crewneck sweatshirt that hung low. Hart was in a nearly identical getup, just with different colors. The twins were a mirror of their childhood selves, back in the days when their mother dressed them alike and they’d do everything together, like sneak out after being tucked in, daring each other to see who was brave enough to venture farthest into the dark wood. Now Heather eyed the packet in Hart’s hand like a gunslinger in a standoff. The expression flitting across her face showed she already knew the answer to her own question.

“Do you have a tracking device on me or something?” Hart asked.

“You’re going back to the garden?” Heather asked, incredulous. “You’re going to make the wish again?”

“Heather, you don’t understand—”

“You’re so selfish,” she spat.

“Do you honestly think I’d bring her back just so I can watch her die again?”

“Seems that way!” Heather said.

“Now that I know the consequence—”

“Hart, listen to yourself—”

“Now that I know the consequence,” Hart repeated, louder this time, shutting his eyes to shut his sister out, “I can do something to change it. I can protect her. I can prevent—”

“So you’re just going to bring her back and hope she doesn’t die.”

The way Heather said that word—“hope”—it was so full of derision. As if hope was a myth, something only little kids and small-minded people believed in. But Hart knew that having hope was the difference between life and death. What were they without it?

“You can’t do this,” Heather said.

Hart bent his head low, nodding to himself mostly. Psyching himself up for whatever would come. “I need to,” he said.

When he looked back up, his gaze locked with his sister’s, neither one of them moving, neither blinking.

Then Heather bolted.

She ran so quick, lurching so swiftly out the door that the suddenness of it stunted Hart, and it took him a slow, long beat to do anything but watch her go. “Heather!” he called after her, both alarmed and incredulous.

Finally, he got a move on, crashing through the exit, the door snapping against the frame. He chased after his sister, the still night air turning into sharp wind that prickled the skin on his face as he whipped through it. His decision not to put on any shoes came back to haunt him as Heather sailed through the shrubbery while something pierced the bottom of Hart’s foot. He yelped, falling into a messy roll. Of all the things to slow him down, it was the pointy end of a damn twig digging into his stupidly bare foot. He recovered and kept running, threading through the eye of the stone archway and into the Rose Garden.

He shot through the hacked hedge, branches snagging his sweatshirt and slicing skin. It was only when he burst into the Wish Garden that Hart stopped to take a breath. Panting, hands on knees, he glanced around, expecting to find Heather. But she wasn’t here.

It didn’t make sense. She’d gotten a head start. She should’ve beaten him here. But Hart turned in place, a full 360 as he inhaled hard through his nostrils. He was alone. He had half a mind to get on his knees then and there, dig a hole and drop a seed into it, but it wouldn’t be any use. Heather would just pull the seedling out like she had been doing. And even if he waited for her to come, waited for her to yank his wish out by the roots, the twins would have to answer to each other. There was no avoiding it.

Hart’s mind raced with the possibilities of where she was, what she was planning. Where had she run off to in such a hurry that was more pertinent than the Wish Garden? But by the time he had caught all his breath, Heather finally showed up and answered his questions. She’d gone to the toolshed—a modest name for the garage where they housed the lawn mowers and utility vehicles. And Hart knew that was where she’d gone, because it was the only place on the property where she could have gotten the canister of gasoline now clutched in her hand.

“A fire?” he asked. “Seriously?” The idea sounded so ludicrous, so outside the realm of possibility, that Hart had to laugh. But the moment Heather flung her arm up, shaking the canister enough to get the liquid it contained to spill out and splatter the ground, all traces of laughter fizzled out of him. “Heather, what the hell are you doing?”

She shrugged but kept splashing. “Not doing anything.”

All Hart heard was a childish retort, along the same infuriating lines as Stop hitting yourself . He lunged for the canister, but Heather expertly swung it out of his reach, flinging a fresh splash of gasoline over the nearest bushes. When they would fight as kids, Heather had always been more spry than Hart, ducking his too-wide swings and slipping through his body locks as though she were coated in butter. He was never able to properly hold her down. And Hart realized, dimly, that chances were good he wouldn’t be able to catch her now, either.

Still, he dove. He got her elbow—attached to the hand that was holding the canister—but only for a second, as Heather easily squirmed out of his grasp. He ended up in a hydrangea shrub, and fresh gasoline rained over a couple of hellebores. Hart scrambled to his feet, his gaze a magnet following Heather’s every move. He calculated how he could best catch her, pin her down. He was bigger than her—it shouldn’t be that hard. But by the ease with which she swung the can now, it must’ve been almost empty. Hart’s only recourse was to reason with her.

“You can’t just destroy the garden!” he said.

Heather gave the can a final vicious shake, which produced the last measly drops of gasoline. She tossed the empty thing aside like a used tissue.

“The garden isn’t good for us,” she said simply. “It took me a while to get that, but I see it now. I see what you used to see, once upon a time.”

It had finally happened. All her wish-making—all the countless, unseen consequences—had finally made Heather lose her mind. Hart was sure of that now. The evidence was in how calm she was being about all this. As if setting fire to their family’s whole world—their whole legacy—was a perfectly rational course of action. “H, you’re not thinking straight.”

“I’m the only one who’s thinking straight,” she said. “The garden is dangerous. All this time we thought it was a blessing. But it’s a curse.” She dug in her pajama pants pocket and Hart could see the outline of her fingers searching, and then the blocky shape of the thing she was fishing for. Her lighter.

In the span of a heartbeat, Hart understood how the two of them had gotten to be at this spot in this very moment. When Heather couldn’t sleep, she would get up to smoke. He could just picture her on the stone terrace overlooking the backyard, her glazed, vacant stare coming into razor focus with the greenhouse suddenly glowing to life in the distance. Heather’s fucked-up habit was the stupidest reason for why Hart was currently in this mess.

Reasoning turned to bargaining. “One last time, okay?” he said. “I’m going to do everything different, I promise. Once she’s back I’ll make a new wish. I’ll figure out just the right thing to say to keep her alive. I’ll find a new loophole, okay?”

But Heather shook her head, and Hart couldn’t be sure she was even listening. He tried a new tactic. “It’s the only way to bring back Lowell!” He gestured pitifully to the mound of dirt a few yards behind Heather, beneath the elm tree. “He didn’t deserve any of this. We turn back time and we just leave him alone, right? He never has to know about the garden and the wishes and the rest of it.”

“Hart.”

Hart shut his eyes to his name, hearing the biting rejection in it.

“He wouldn’t be under your feet right now if it wasn’t for you!” he shouted.

Heather stood as still as a stone. A crack in her armor, and Hart kept chiseling at it. “Every other time I brought Rose to that house party it went fine, but this time you decided to go on a deranged rant and Lowell had to defend her. He only showed up in Rose’s life because of you!”

Hart’s chest ached with the rancor of his words. But the only effect they had on Heather was drawing a tear out of her eye. One tear and then she was back at it, reaching for her lighter again.

New tactic. “H, please,” he begged. “Rose is my destiny.”

He spoke with his eyes still closed, because he could not bear to look out into a place like this. This hellish landscape of slashed hedges, and flowers dripping with gasoline, the threat of fire so present he could taste it. His once magical garden was a place Hart couldn’t recognize anymore.

“I thought I could go on without her, but I can’t,” he said. “I was spoiled with four lifetimes with Rose. How do you expect me to live a life without her?”

When he couldn’t stand the deep silence any longer, Hart opened his eyes and was met with his twin’s glassy stare. In her eyes he saw a glimpse of who she’d once been. Before the wishes and the consequences took so much from her, back when she and Rose were as close as two friends could be. Back when they were sisters.

“I’m sorry,” Heather said. But her vagueness—her persistent ambiguous words—itched at him. Was she sorry for his loss? Or because her mind was made up and would remain unchanged? Her somber tone, he thought, held in it both of those possibilities. “What are you sorry for?” he demanded.

“I’m sorry you’ll never get her back.”

“Heather,” he breathed.

She lifted the lighter, and though she hadn’t turned it on, something did spark, burning hot in Hart. “So what’s your plan?” he spat. “Set everything on fire? The garden won’t let you.”

“The fire’ll catch before the garden can do anything to stop it.”

New tactic.

“You’ll kill us both,” Hart said. The stone-cold truth. The garden might go up in flames instantly, or it would retaliate the moment after flames licked its leaves. Whatever happened, Heather and Hart were in the garden’s crosshairs.

“Then leave,” Heather said.

The calmness with which she said it sent a chill through Hart’s veins. It was the most levelheaded she’d sounded all night, and she was talking about her own death.

“Heather!” Hart yelled her name like a clapper in a bell, trying to shake her out of this nonsense, trying to talk some sense into her. It was the kind of petulant, useless yell you could only save for a sibling who refused to give you what you wanted. “Are you really going to die for this?”

Heather let out a singular wail that rang through her brother, rattling his soul. “This isn’t just about you, Hart! Do you think it’s been easy for me? To live in this fucking loop for lifetimes?” Her face crumpled with sobs. “I never get to be in love. I never get to have a family. I never get to have a life because you keep making this wish!”

Hart was all rising panic, but every word out of Heather was a measured, dull blade through his gut. And for the first time he saw his sister for who she was. How she’d gone from the twin he’d grown up with to the distant, aloof, chaotic person she’d become. Acting out because she’d experienced all this before. Because Hart had unknowingly trapped her in a box and refused to let her out.

As much as he felt for her in that moment, every instinct in Hart told him to keep that box sealed tight. “I’m sorry,” he mumbled. “You have to let me do this.”

Heather’s eyes brimmed with tears. Hart could even hear them clogging up her throat. “I have my own love story I want to get back to, Hart. I can’t be stuck in this loop forever. Maybe this is the only way to get out of it.” With a flick of her thumb, the Zippo in her grip cracked open and the small flame licked the night, bathing Heather in its warm light.

Instantly, Hart fell to his knees.

In the slow-motion forever between when Heather lit the lighter and when she uncurled her fingers and dropped it, Hart rationalized it all.

He would make his final wish.

The garden would burn but he’d dig the seed deep, where fire couldn’t catch it.

The sweet violet would grow out of the ashes. Anything could grow out of this garden, no matter the conditions.

And Heather wouldn’t be here to pull his wish out.

All Hart needed was one more wish. He knew he’d get it right this time. If the consequence of love really was grief, then he’d find a way to get grief from somewhere else. He could pay his dues in this lifetime. If the garden wanted him to feel pain so bad, he’d grieve its destruction.

Maybe Heather was right. Maybe this was her only way out of the loop. She would die, but Hart would turn back time and she’d come back—free of her awful burden of remembering every lifetime. Hart was sure that would work—it had to work. Maybe making this wish was the only way for Hart to save Heather now. Yes, he was going to save his sister’s life and Lowell’s life and Rose’s life. He smiled, secure in his reasoning. He would get them all back and he would make it work this time.

A clean slate.

Hart poked a deep hole, then ripped the paper packet open, and though his attention was laser-focused on the task before him, out of the corner of his eye he could already see the lighter and its flame falling, like a shooting star crashing down to earth. People make wishes on shooting stars , Hart thought, laughing. He’d once told Rose that.

Before the star touched the ground, setting everything ablaze and turning his world dark, Hart muttered his final wish in the quickest breath.

“I wish to go back to the moment I met Rose.”