Wendy had climbed to the top of the tall wardrobe in the nursery, not even hesitating a moment before she jumped. She had been so certain she would fly around the ceiling, just like they did that first night with Peter, that she hadn’t felt a moment of doubt or fear until she’d crashed to the floor and broken her arm.
Wendy rubs at her arm, as though she might feel the ghost of the old fracture there beneath her skin. She’d been a child then. If she tries the same thing again now, as a grown woman, how will she explain herself to Ned and her brothers if she fails? Hysterical —the ghost of the word rings in her ears. John trusts her now, and even Michael. Would she undo all that? For a chance to save Jane, yes.
She could sneak down the back staircase, but what if her father-in-law left someone watching, one of the men from Scotland Yard lurking in the shadows?
No. The first time she traveled to Neverland, she left by the window. And Peter took Jane via the window, so she will go that way too. All her belief, held onto through the years—she must focus on that now, banish every single shred of doubt. Her mind and her truth are her own. No part of her belongs to Dr. Harrington or her brothers. She is alone, and she alone can save Jane.
Wendy fixes her gaze on the stars, pushing away thoughts of the hard, bruising, breaking stones below. Jane. She must think of Jane. Happy thoughts. She edges her foot forward. Happy.
Except her happiest thought is also her most terrible—the memory of holding Jane for the very first time. The sweet, blood-sticky weight of her, red-faced and crying, placed into Wendy’s arms. Jane had Ned’s hair then, just a few strands of it plastered dark against her still-soft skull. In that moment, love had cracked Wendy open wide, leaving room for fear to slip in. Loving something means having something to lose.
It’s a truth Wendy has known since she lost Neverland, since Michael went to war and came home with ghosts in his eyes, since their parents boarded a ship doomed to sink. And oh, how much sharper that knowledge became when she first held Jane.
How did her own mother feel all those years ago, entering the nursery to find not one but all three of her children gone? If she’d survived, maybe Wendy could have found a way to ask her, and to find out whether she too had been terrified when Wendy was first born. But she’d had no one to ask about being a mother, no one to warn her of all the ways it could make and unmake her heart in a single breath—watching her daughter take her first steps, watching her trip and fall.
Had she and John and Michael even thought, as children, what their grand adventure would do to their parents? No, they’d been callous and cruel. They hadn’t looked back even once as they’d flown in Peter’s wake. And when they’d returned, Wendy’s insistence on a grand adventure, her desire to return to that wonderful land that couldn’t possibly exist. What must that have done to her parents’ hearts, not knowing how their children might have been hurt, where they’d gone? Finding their daughter, even returned to them, suddenly transformed into a stranger.
Wendy herself had thought nothing of that then, how she made her parents and her brothers’ lives more difficult. She had thought only of freedom as she leapt through the nursery window that night, of the chance to perhaps be something more than a second mother to her brothers, even for a little while.
Then they’d arrived in Neverland and she’d discovered a whole new set of rules, changing at Peter’s whim, and he’d wanted her to be a mother to all of his boys, not just Michael and John. Even so, she’d still ached to return. Why? Was it that the good had outweighed the bad, or was it that she’d left a piece of herself behind? Something unfinished, undone?
Wendy peels her fingers from the window frame, takes a breath, empties her mind of everything but Jane, and lets go.
Air whistles shrill and sharp. Her clothing snaps like sails and flags on a long-ago pirate ship. Jane. Jane. Jane. Wendy thinks of her daughter fiercely, love and pain wrapped all in one. Happiness. Home. The thought slips in, unbidden. She’s going home.
She shoots upward, toes nearly scraping the courtyard’s stone as she rises sharply and soars over the gate, diving into the sky above London. Up, up, Wendy twists until the sky is beneath her and she’s swimming down into it, flying through to the other side of night where Neverland lies waiting.
The rush of air is no longer a scream, but a triumphant yell. Her body remembers flight, the ache of muscles held taut against gravity, and the years fall away. Wendy stretches her arms, her shawl spread between them like wings, and embraces the glittering dark. She banks, rolls, then turns a loop, shedding fear with each motion. The map of London spread below her becomes mere points of light, blurred together as she gains speed.
Is that Westminster Abbey? Kew Gardens? She skims low again before rising once more—a shooting star in reverse. It is glorious. The pain inside her uncoils, and for just a moment, Wendy allows herself to laugh out loud. The wind snatches the sound from her and streams it out behind her.
Neverland. She marks the stars against the velvet sky. They’re no longer the stars above London. She’s already passed through that invisible barrier to where they’re different, other and impossible. Too far to turn back now, not that she would. Wendy finds the second star from the right, knowing it like an anchor to her soul, and sets her course, flying
