“Having second thoughts?” Her eyes flash towards mine, I can’t help but smile. “Last time we stood here, Darling, you told me you wished I could be your beginning and your end. Your forever, in a sense.”

“You were,” she seethes as her body turns and meets mine. “I felt alive for the first time when you brought me to Neverland.” My smile widens at her admission. My pride at an all-time high. “But I died when you promised me the world and never came back.”

Her words pierce my heart and stop it, just like the day I first watched her gaze out across the forest. This time, it’s a different kind of death I feel strangling me alive. Leaning in, my eyes search hers as I counter, “This is my world. You’re the one that wanted to leave it.”

“I left because I had to,” she hisses, and I eye her disapprovingly before she rolls her eyes. “You know why. How can you be so heartless?”

“Ah, yes,” I shake my head, backing off and walking around her frame slowly to look out across the forest. “How can I forget? Michael. He always was the whiniest one of them all.”

“He got hurt,” she shouts, but I don’t even flinch. How could I show that I care for a child who took what I needed most in my world away from me? “He wanted his mother. He wanted to go home. He needed a doctor.”

Turning quickly, I yell back, “You didn’t have to stay, Darling. Play nurse to a boy who had more than enough attention for just a mere scratch.”

“Scratch?” she shouts back. “He received over sixty stitches. One blood transfusion. He was only ten. Not everything in life is a game, Pan. We don’t all get as lucky as you!”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“It means not all of us are protected by pixie dust, or whatever the hell you want to call it.” I flinch instinctively and hope to God she doesn’t notice. “It means, we can’t all just fly away, dodge danger the way you can.” Her icy stare slices its way through my chest and pierces into my soul, making me wish I could tell her everything that I’ve been afraid to tell her for far too long. “You were supposed to be watching him that day. You were supposed to take care of him.”

“The only one I ever made that promise to, was you, Darling. Not Michael. Not John. Not any of the lost boys.”

“If you loved me, you would’ve protected…”

“Who said anything about love?”

She sucks in a sharp breath and stops. Fuck, I can’t tell her the real reason Michael got hurt that day, so I lashed back the only way my heart knows how. With resentment.