The garden was her place of retreat. Two years ago, after she’d tried a healing on her own and messed everything up, she’d come here. Her magic broken, her heart broken. The shadow garden was the one place where Addison found solace, and the plants responded in kind. It was as if they could feel her pain and sought to comfort her. But while the garden eagerly accepted the heartache the Haywoods eased in others, the plants were powerless to heal the Haywood women themselves.

A vine rose in front of Addison, blackberries hanging from its tip. She tilted her head, held out a hand, and one of the berries dropped into her palm.

Normally, Addison didn’t eat from the shadow garden. The last thing she needed was to intensify her pain. But who was she to turn away a gift from the garden?

She dropped the berry into her mouth, and it hit her tongue with the barest hint of vanilla. At first, her own sadness welled up inside her. It settled into her chest, where it grew and grew, making her vision swim. She brushed back tears, but when she blinked her eyes open, all she saw was darkness.

She tried to stand, but her legs wouldn’t respond.

Panic had only just settled in when she started to see again. Dirt and worms and pill bugs. Grubs and millipedes and roots, so many roots.

These weren’t Addison’s thoughts.

They belonged to the shadow garden.

Addison traveled along the root system as if she, too, were buried in that magical earth. Each plant fed into the other… and all of them were weak and frightened. She moved from tendril to tendril for what felt like miles. The further she went, the weaker she felt. The soil had once been rich with sorrow. Now it was empty. Depleted.

Soon, there would be nothing left.

Addison stopped. The roots twisted down, down, down. They stretched farther than any plant should. The soil couldn’t feed them, so they’d turned on each other, desperate and starving.

Rows of black cornstalks stretched as far as Addison could see—the dark corn the Bonners grew for their bourbon—and wisps of inky silk bled from them, up into clouds of gloom.

Addison blinked, fighting for breath as the vision loosened its hold on her. She tried to make sense of it, her mind going back to yesterday’s tea-leaf reading.