The photograph haunted her.
Sera kept it tucked into the back of her journal, but it might as well have been burned into her memory. The girl—Celeste Wynn—had the same tilted jaw, the same storm-gray eyes, even the same slight inward curve to her knees. A mirror from another time.
The greenhouse in the picture wasn't one she recognized, but something about it gnawed at her thoughts. The shape of the windows. The ivy curling up its frame. It felt... familiar. Like she'd walked through its halls in a dream.
Or maybe a memory.
That night, while the rest of Elowen Ridge slept under a layer of spring fog, Sera returned to her own greenhouse. She walked past the tidy rows of pansies and peonies, past the shelf of dried herbs and pressed petals. She opened the hidden door in the back—something only she and Mira ever used—and stepped into the overgrown space behind it.
What had once been a forgotten corner was now wild, choked with vines and moss and silent, breathing green.
She pushed through the undergrowth, heart thudding. A few feet in, her foot caught on something hard. She crouched down, brushed aside the leaves—and froze.
Glass.
Thick, jagged, green-streaked panes. Buried under years of growth.
And beneath that: rusted steel.
A foundation.
This wasn't just a forgotten garden.
It was another greenhouse.
And it had been here the whole time.
The next morning, Lina arrived to find Sera with dirt-smudged cheeks and bloodied palms, dragging a rusted iron frame from the earth.
"I'm guessing this isn't for a flower arrangement," Lina muttered, kneeling beside her.
"It's the one from the photo," Sera said. "The one with Celeste."
They cleared as much as they could before nightfall—just enough to reveal the skeletal remains of the structure. A crumbling arch. A twisted hinge. Glass shards that shimmered with a faint, unnatural sheen.
At the heart of the wreckage was something intact: a stone pedestal with a circular basin carved into the top. Inside it was dirt—dry, cracked, ancient.
But just as Sera leaned over it, the wind shifted.
And the dirt moved.
A bloom unfurled right before their eyes.
Black. Sharp-edged. Fragrant with a sweetness that felt wrong in her lungs.
Then came the whisper.
"She never left."
Sera and Lina jumped back.
The flower had spoken.
That night, Sera dreamed of the greenhouse again—but it was whole. Alive.
Celeste stood at the center, barefoot, her hands dripping red. Her eyes locked on Sera.
"You opened the door," she whispered.
"Now everything must grow."
Sera awoke gasping and found herself in bed, wrapped in cold sweat. The flower from the pedestal had somehow bloomed on her nightstand.
Only—it wasn't the same one.
This one was white, glowing faintly. And instead of the sharp, smoky scent, it smelled like violets and vanilla and something warm. Lina.
It pulsed with emotion—tenderness, longing, worry.
And beneath it all, fear.
Lina had left her mark.
But so had something else.
Because when Sera looked at the petals again, she saw writing etched into the edges like veins.
The roots remember what blood forgets.
The town was changing.
That morning, five more anonymous bouquets were reported across Elowen Ridge. A child woke up screaming from dreams of a burning forest. The mayor's wife fainted in her garden after digging up a rose bush and finding bones beneath it.
Sera knew it was connected.
And so did Lina.
"We need to find the rest of Celeste's greenhouse," she said, pacing the shop.
"We barely survived the first flower," Sera replied. "What happens when we unearth the rest?"
Lina looked her dead in the eye.
"We find out who's sending the messages—and what they want from you."
That evening, as rain tapped softly on the windows, Sera returned to the basin in the greenhouse ruins. She placed her hand over the soil and let herself feel.
The world melted away.
She was Celeste, for a moment—running through the forest, barefoot, chased by shadows in uniform. She was hiding flowers in children's shoes. She was kissing a girl with copper curls and begging her not to forget.
Then—
Darkness.
Fire.
Roots that screamed as they were torn from the earth.
Sera collapsed to her knees, weeping.
When she looked up, the sky above was spinning.
And the flowers were all in bloom.
Every single one.