THE SPARK UNFOLDING BOOK CLUB
AUTHORIZED SAMPLE EXCERPT

THE GARDEN AT THE END OF THE WILDERNESS
A Novel of Surrender, Resurrection, and the God Who Makes Deserts Bloom
By Dr. Sherry-Ann Brown

Leah Mercer found the key where her grandmother said it would be, beneath a river stone shaped like a sleeping heart.

Rain had darkened the stone to charcoal. When Leah lifted it, the soil beneath gave off the clean, mineral scent of earth opening after a long silence. The key lay in a shallow hollow, wrapped in oilcloth and tied with green thread. It was larger than a house key, its iron shaft rough with age, its bow worked into the shape of two leaves facing one another.

For three minutes Leah remained crouched beside the locked gate, one hand around the key and the other braced against the wet ground. Her knees objected. Her back remembered thirty-six hours of hospital corridors, two flights, and a rental car that had begun flashing a warning light outside the last town with an open service station. Fatigue had become so ordinary that she no longer experienced it as a feeling. It was a climate in which she lived.

Beyond the gate, the garden waited.

It occupied eleven acres at the edge of Bellwether, Washington, where the foothills rose gradually toward mountains still holding snow. From the road, the property looked abandoned. Cedar shingles had fallen from the retreat house. Blackberry vines knitted themselves through the western fence. The sign that once read HAVEN OF THE RIVER had lost three letters, leaving a phrase that looked like a warning in an unknown language.

Yet through the bars Leah could see intention beneath the neglect. A path of pale stones curved rather than traveling straight. Bare maples held their branches over a dry streambed. Moss softened the shoulders of a small arched bridge. Farther in, a dark-limbed cherry tree occupied a circular clearing, its crown rising above the garden like a many-armed question.

Her grandmother, Miriam, had spoken of the place only twice.

The first time Leah was nine. They had been shelling peas on a porch in Tacoma when Miriam said, “There is a garden that knows your name.” Leah had laughed because gardens did not speak and because, at nine, she believed every true thing could be distinguished by whether it behaved sensibly.

The second time came four days before Miriam died.

“The stone shaped like a heart,” she whispered from the hospice bed. “The key is underneath. Promise me you will open the gate before anyone sells it.”

Leah had promised because the dying should not have to bargain for peace.

Now the promise weighed more than the key.

She stood, pushed the iron into the lock, and turned. The mechanism resisted, then released with a sound that traveled through the gate and into her hands.

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Copyright 2026 Sherry-Ann Brown. All rights reserved. This authorized sample may be downloaded for personal reading. It may not be sold, republished, used to train a model, or presented as the complete book.