The weight is too much. Wendy snatches the pillow from the bed and crushes it against her mouth. She gasps air in shallow breaths, each growing more ragged until her lungs threaten to burst.
Then into the terrible silence around her, pillow-muffled, full of fear and rage, Wendy Darling screams.
LONDON 1931
Wendy returns to Jane’s window. The inspectors from Scotland Yard have come and gone. For hours her house has been filled with men’s voices—their rough laughter when they were unaware of her listening, their questions that she can give no answers to, the stink of tobacco clinging to their uniforms and skin. She hates every last one of them. Now, only her father-in-law remains, and she hates him most of all.
Ned’s father arrived with the inspectors, without Wendy or Ned having spoken to him about what occurred. Wendy can’t help but believe that her father-in-law arranged with the chief inspector—a personal friend—that he would be contacted immediately should any emergency calls originate from their house. Anger simmers beneath her weariness, made worse by the fact that she can say none of this aloud. Silently, she curses her father-in-law, and curses Scotland Yard for spineless cowardice.
As if she and Ned are insufficient on their own to keep their household safe. The thought brings bitter laughter, but Wendy traps it behind her lips. Oh, but she is insufficient. The knowledge twists blade-sharp, stealing her breath. She lost Jane. She let Peter steal her daughter away.
Wendy knots her fingers, staring at the darkened streets beyond Jane’s window. She is tired to the bone, and at the same time, sleep is the farthest thing from her mind. The inspectors and her father-in-law asked her dozens of questions, then asked them all over again to Ned. As if by virtue of his sex he must know more than she ever could. And all the while, questioning or silent, her father-in-law had glared at them both.
Untangling her fingers, Wendy wraps her arms around her upper body, holding onto her elbows to keep from flying apart.
She lied. To the men from Scotland Yard. To her father-in-law. Even to Ned. She told them she simply woke—a mother’s instinct—and came to her daughter’s room to find her gone. The aftertaste of dishonesty lies thick on her tongue. But what else could she say?
She’s been lying to Ned for years, withholding this one vital piece of truth. For eleven years she’s played at being a good wife, a good mother; there have been days she’s even managed to convince herself. But now it’s all falling apart, as much of a sham as her mothering of Peter and the boys in Neverland.
She chose this, she tried, and still she failed. It takes everything in Wendy not to shout, to hurl everything she can lay her hands on and scream the truth until her throat bleeds. She is not, and will not, ever be good enough for anything but lies and make-believe.
She leaves the window, pacing through Jane’s room. Her fingers trail over butterflies carefully pinned under glass, over collections of rocks and seashells and leaves, all held in cases of their own. Jane’s books. The globe atop her shelf, marked with pins for all the places her daughter wanted to visit. Of all those lands she dreamed of, Jane couldn’t have pictured Neverland. Wendy should have warned her. She should have…
Wendy lifts a butterfly case. The label is written in Jane’s neat hand—neater than Wendy’s ever was at her age. Holly blue, Celastrina argiolus. Jane caught it on the holiday they took in Northumberland, so excited she’d clutched the jar like a treasure all the way home.
The memory tightens Wendy’s throat, threatening her with tears. She wants to smash the case, smash everything in the room. Instead, she sets the glassed-in butterfly down as gently as she can.
“Come away, darling.” Ned touches her shoulder.
Wendy jumps. She never heard him enter. How long has she been standing here, staring? His hand is warm and strong on her shoulder and she wants to shrug him away, but she forces herself to turn.
Tiny threads of crimson in Ned’s eyes mark his own grief, and the tightness in his posture is unmistakable. Beneath his neatly trimmed moustache, his lips press a thin line. He’s as afraid for Jane as she is, maybe more so, because he understands even less of what’s going on. She should tell him. She should, but she won’t.
“Where’s Mary?” The words emerge sharp, in place of comfort.
Wendy hates herself, but even so she can’t stop herself from looking past Ned’s shoulder as if Mary might appear in the doorway carrying a tray laden with tea. Her pulse catches. Her father-in-law stands there instead, light from the hallway transforming him into an imposing blot of shadow.
“I sent Cook home.” Ned stresses Mary’s title, his tone matched to hers.
Wendy hears the brittleness under it, but she straightens, stepping back an inch as if too much closeness, even between husband and wife at a time like this, might be improper somehow. She cannot see her father-in-law’s face for the light behind him, but she imagines his frown. Wendy knows his opinion of Mary, and she knows it isn’t one Ned shares. Under normal circumstances, he never would have sent her home. He would call her Mary, rather than Cook, and he might be the one to make tea for all three of them as they shared their worries over Jane. But as long as Ned’s father is here, none of that matters.
To her father-in-law, Mary is that girl—always emphasizing the word. A bad influence on your household, and by that, Wendy knows he means a bad influence on her. You know how their kind are. And those are only the words he’s spoken in her hearing.
