As they pick up Jake’s lifeless body and start to walk out of the room I follow. I walk away from the boy that I couldn’t stand to watch become a man. He wanted to sacrifice himself for me, but I couldn’t let him. I leave my room, abandon the nursery, and surrender my heart to a fate that was always supposed to be our end.

I can’t take you with me, Peter.

I have to push him away to protect him. To keep him just the way he is. Maybe that’s part of the magic of love. The illusions of the beginning, they keep us breathlessly delusional until the very end. Maybe Nana was right.

I know I’ll always love Peter. But I can’t take him with me. And where he’s going, I can no longer follow.

Chapter 21

Hook

“That was the last time the girl Wendy ever saw him. For a little longer, she tried for his sake not to have growing pains, and when they met again, Wendy was a married woman… Wendy was grown up.”

Peter & Wendy

- J.M. Barrie

PRESENT DAY

Wendy cries in her sleep as I gently brush my fingers up and down her bare arm. She whispers my name. The pixie dust is beginning to wear off and a shiver courses through her body. My high depleted a long time ago and for endless hours I’ve been laying here watching her.

“Peter,” she cries, and it pulls at my heart, but her next words break it fucking wide open. “I’m so sorry.”

Clutching her to my chest tightly, I whisper in her ear. “Wendy,” she doesn’t wake up, just continues to sob softly. “Darling, come back to me.”

She turns over, clutching herself tightly to me like a monkey. Her arms pull me closer. Her right leg quickly drapes over my side. I smile into the crown of her head and drown in her. In this moment. A moment I thought I’d never get back that night seventeen years ago, when everything between us was destroyed.

“Peter,” she cries harder. “I’m so scared,” my brow furrows as I feel her grip tighten. If she’s still sleeping, I’ll never know. “I can’t lose you twice,” she sobs.

“You never lost me, Darling,” I confess, a reality that breaks my heart wide open as I admit it. “You never could.”

She shakes her head and pulls me closer, giving me the hint that she’s lucid now. She doesn’t speak for a moment, and in the past that might have made me nervous. But not now. Not after we’ve already lost everything yet, somehow, made it right back here. Home. To each other.

Picking up her hand, I raise it to my lips and kiss the ring that still sits on her finger. “I thought you got rid of this.”