Harvest Moon Garden keeps its own calendar.

The moonflowers know when the evenings have cooled enough, when the lanterns begin appearing along the paths, and when Everhallow is close enough to the Harvest Moon Festival that everyone starts pretending they are not counting the days.

This year, the oldest beds have missed their cue.

Cora Fenwick has checked the water, the soil, the roots, the leaves, and the magic. She has asked the flowers politely. She has asked them less politely. The moonflowers remain stubbornly closed.

Then a non-magical restoration specialist arrives carrying a soil case and the deeply inconvenient suggestion that the garden may not need more magic. Everhallow has seen stranger beginnings.

There are gardens that behave exactly as expected.

Harvest Moon Garden has never been one of them.

The oldest moonflowers are holding tight to secrets buried beneath years of roots, magic, weather, and care—and Cora Fenwick is beginning to suspect that doing more may not be the same thing as doing what the garden needs.

Nathan Rook has questions. Cora has considerably more magic than patience for some of them. The moonflowers, naturally, have declined to explain themselves.

The Harvest Moon Festival is getting closer.

And somewhere between the old seeds, the lantern-lit paths, and one very stubborn restoration specialist, the garden is about to ask Cora for something she has never been especially good at giving.

Room.