The roots tickled her skin, a little slower than usual. They wrapped around her fingers, prodded at her knuckles, but Irene had no sorrow to offer them. As quickly as they’d come, they retreated deeper into the dirt and out of reach. It was like Addison said. They felt hungry.

With her free hand, Irene rubbed at her face and tried to gather her thoughts. Over the past few years, Maura had pulled back from healing, her own sort of retirement as she left the family magic to Irene. Addison had never been able to take care of their customers alone, which meant there were fewer Haywoods pouring pain into the earth. But that wasn’t all. People who once brought their heartache to the Haywoods had turned, instead, to the memory harvest. After all, why enlist a witch to tend to your suffering when you could give it all up in one moment, forgotten forever?

Maybe the garden was starving, Irene realized. It was a sobering thought, but not one that Irene was ready to sort through on her own. She glanced back at the house, where she saw Maura watching her from the attic window. Irene certainly wasn’t going to be able to get her mother and daughter to work together until everyone had time to cool off.

At the sound of tires on gravel, Irene pushed herself to her feet. She wiped the dirt from her hands and went to meet Clem and Kaden. As promised, Clem had gotten them a feast, but as soon as she arrived, she left with a wink and an excuse that she needed to take inventory at the shop.

Irene grabbed a quilt and set it up on a bare patch of dirt toward the edge of the shadow garden where the plants grew low to the ground, offering a view of the forest beyond, far from where her family’s land met the cornfields.

Even after everything that happened at the funeral—including her lingering guilt, her worry over the garden, and a handful of unanswered apology texts to Addison—Irene’s mind kept straying back to the afternoon at the rope swing, her lips so close to Kaden’s.

Yes, she’d been drunk then, but she couldn’t deny there was something between them—something she wanted to turn over in her hands and explore, because Kaden was everything Irene hadn’t known she was looking for in a partner. And the first person she’d been interested in in twenty-five years. She’d always thought that Nate broke whatever romantic impulse she’d ever had. But when she saw Kaden, she felt her body light up in places she’d thought had long since gone dormant.