The question I’m going to address in this talk is: Is there a deeper connection between the rules of use associated with (utterances of) counterfactuals and the rules of use associated with reports of counterfactual desires? Heim (1992) proposes a semantics for desire reports that suggests that the answer is: yes. Her proposal is based on the idea that “there is a hidden conditional in every desire report”, an idea she traces back to Stalnaker (1984). In the first part of the talk, I present a decompositional account of Heim’s proposal that reduces the rules of use associated with reports of counterfactual desires to the rules of use of counterfactuals and standard assumptions about the projection of presuppositions under attitudes. In the second part of the talk, I present cross- linguistic data, mainly based on von Fintel & Iatridou (2022) and my own work, that show that in many languges there is a close grammatical connection between counterfactuals and reports of counterfactual desires. I argue that Heim’s conceptual idea if taken quite literally as an idea about the grammar of desire reports is the most promissing candidate to date in explaining the cross-linguistic facts. The surprising harmony between Heim’s conceptual idea and the empirical facts suggests that there may be an important lesson to be learned from grammar about the notional category of counterfactual desires.