“Yeah, me neither,” he said. “Should we go?”

“It’s okay,” I said. I carried a hose looped over my shoulder, one of the extras from the back of the greenhouse, and I planned to hook it up to one of the spigots that had been installed by whoever built the wall.

We rounded the corner and I was busy inspecting the rubber washer at the end of the hose. I hoped it wasn’t too corroded. The dry rot got to the rubber if you didn’t keep it moist enough.

“Margot,” Barrett said, quietly and quickly.

“Yeah?” I asked, turning to face him. But halfway through the turn, I stopped.

I stared.

“No,” Barrett said. “Right?”

He meant, No way are we seeing what we think we’re seeing.

The bulbs we had planted the previous night, if we were lucky, should have been soaking in water and getting a feel for the warmth and weight of the soil. If all went according to plan, in about two weeks, the first tiny green shoots should creep out of the papery layers of the bulb and poke out of the soil. In a month, maybe a plant would be on its way to flowering.

But now—less than a full day later—the grave was completely surrounded by brilliant dark red lilies, fully grown and open, yawning and leaning and swaying on their slender stems. Their leaves, like oversize blades of grass, bent gracefully toward the ground.

“No way,” I said.

This was a complete impossibility. This was the kind of thing that didn’t happen in reality.

“I don’t understand,” Barrett said. He knelt to inspect one of the flowers, lightly touching its velvet-soft petal as if he half expected it to snap shut on his fingers.

I knelt next to him, feeling weirdly afraid.

“It’s like magic,” I whispered, and then I stood up and backed away.

Barrett stayed there, looking at the grave, which now seemed so small—like a child’s bed, its edges defined by the lush crowd of lilies.

Then he looked over his shoulder at me and laughed in amazement, and for a moment the sound of it transported me back through time to my old life, days spent sitting in the cafeteria at school with Becca and CJ and the others, the hum of happy/stressed/tired chatter all around us. And punctuating it from random corners of the room, laughter. Warm, bright, happy laughter.

“How could this have happened overnight?” Barrett asked.

I didn’t answer. I stared in wonder at the sight. The flowers were beautiful, a deep burgundy with yellow centers and ruffles along the edges of their petals.

A hush seemed to fall over the garden, over us.

The evening’s last light edging in over the wall had turned dazzling gold. It shone on Barrett’s face and turned him into a bronze statue.

“This house . . .” I said.

He came closer. “What about it?”