“Wendy,” Peter says.
Hearing him say her name, Wendy is a child again, toes lifting from the ground, taking flight, about to set off on a grand and delicious adventure. Except he’s not looking at her, he’s looking at Jane. Wendy bites the inside of her cheek, bites down in place of a scream. Does he have any idea how long it’s been? Swallowing the red-salt taste of her blood finally unlocks her throat.
“Peter. I’m here.” It isn’t the shout she wishes, only a half-whispered and ragged thing.
Peter turns, his eyes bright as the moonlight behind him. They narrow. Suspicion first, then a frown.
“Liar,” he says, bold and sure. “You’re not Wendy.”
He makes as if to point at Jane, evidence, but Wendy’s answer stops him.
“I am.” Does he hear the quaver, as much as she tries to hold her voice steady?
She should call Ned, her husband, downstairs in his study, either so absorbed in his books or asleep over them as to be oblivious to her flight down the hall. It is what a sensible person would do. There’s an intruder in their home, in their daughter’s room. Jane is in danger. Wendy swallows, facing Peter alone.
“It’s me, Peter. I grew up.”
Peter’s expression turns into a sneer, Jane forgotten, all his attention on Wendy now. Jane looks in confusion between them. Wendy wants to tell her daughter to run. She wants to tell her to go back to sleep; it’s only a dream. But the mocking edge in Peter’s voice needles her, pulling her focus away.
“What’d you go do that for?”
Wendy’s skin prickles again, hot and cold. The set of his mouth, arrogant as ever, the flicker-brightness of his eyes daring her to adventure, daring her to defy his word-as-law.
“It happens.” Wendy’s voice steadies, anger edging out fear. “To most of us, at least.”
Peter. Here. Real. Not a wild dream held as armor against the world. The years unspool around her as Wendy finally manages to step fully into her daughter’s room. And that armor, polished and patched and fastened tight over the years, cracks. For a terrible moment, Jane is forgotten. Wendy is a creature made all of want, aching for the cold expression to melt from Peter’s face, aching for her friend to take her hand and ask her to fly away with him.
But his hand remains planted firmly on his hip, chin tilted so he can look down at her from his perch on the bed. Wendy takes a second step, and her armor is back in place. She takes a third step, and anger churns stronger than desire—dark water trapped beneath a thick layer of ice.
Wendy clamps her arms by her side, refusing to let one turn traitor and reach toward Peter. She is no longer the heartbroken girl left behind. She is what she has made of herself over the years. She held onto the truth, even when Michael and John forgot. She survived being put away for her delusions, survived the injections, calmatives, and water cures meant to save her from herself. She fought, never stopped fighting; she refused to let Neverland go.
It’s been eleven years since St. Bernadette’s, with its iron fences and high walls, full of frowning nurses and cruel attendants. A place meant to make her better, to cure her, though Wendy knows she was never sick at all. And here is the proof, standing before her, on the end of her daughter’s bed.
Wendy straightens, hardening the line of her jaw, and meets Peter’s eye. In the last eleven years she’s built a life for herself, for her husband and her daughter. She is not that lost and aching girl, and Peter has no power over the Wendy she’s become.
“Peter—” Wendy hears her own voice, stern, admonishing. The voice of a mother, but not the kind Peter ever wanted her to be.
Before she can get any farther, Peter shakes his head, a single sharp motion, dislodging her words like a buzzing gnat circling him. His expression is simultaneously bored and annoyed.
“You’re no fun.” He spins as he says it, a fluid, elegant motion. Peter blurs, and Wendy thinks he’s about to leave, but instead he seizes Jane’s hand. “Never mind. I’ll take this Wendy instead.”
Peter leaps, yanking Jane into the air. Jane lets out a startled cry, and Wendy echoes it—a truncated burst of sound. She isn’t quick enough to close the space between them as Peter dives for the window, Jane in tow. Instead, Wendy falls forward, bashing her knee painfully and catching herself on the window sill.
Wendy’s fingertips brush Jane’s heel and close on empty air. Peter spirals into the night, a cock’s crow trailing in his wake, so familiar, so terrible it overwhelms her. Wendy doesn’t hear if her daughter calls for her; the only sound in the world is the ringing echo of Peter’s call as two child-sized figures disappear against a field of stars.
LONDON 1917
“What is this place?” Wendy asks as the hired car comes to a halt outside a massive iron gate surrounded by a dense green hedge too tall to see over.
Visible through the gate, a long path of crushed stone leads to an imposing building, brick facade and blank-eyed windows glaring out at them. John sighs, his voice tight.
“This is St. Bernadette’s, Wendy.”
John doesn’t wait for the driver. He opens his door and circles to open Wendy’s as well, taking her arm either to help her or keep her from running away.
“We spoke about this, and Dr. Harrington, remember? He’s going to help you get well.”
Wendy bites the inside of her cheek; of course she remembers. Her brothers are the forgetful ones; all she can do is remember. But the bitter, petty part of
