Oh, yes, I almost ran a boy over with my truck last night. Turns out, he claims to be a character from stories my mom made up! Did I mention he doesn’t have a shadow? Like, literally. And he needs my help to find it!

Wendy scowled. Logically, it didn’t make any sense, but she had seen with her own eyes that his shadow was missing. There was no denying who he was any longer.

Wendy tried to organize her thoughts. What did she know?

She knew he was the boy she had been subconsciously drawing. He was her daydreams come to life, even if he was a bit older than the Peter in her mother’s stories. He’d definitely heard her tell stories before, but more important, he knew her brothers. In the middle of all the wild coincidences and impossible things like missing shadows, Peter knowing John and Michael was the most unsettling.

Wendy dried off and changed into an oversized sleep shirt. She crept to her dresser and pulled out of the small jewelry box the one thing she had always associated with her lost memory: the acorn. She sat in the middle of her bed and stared at the acorn, balancing it in the center of her palm.

Peter knew things that she couldn’t remember. He was the key. If he could fill in the chunks of memories that had been ripped from her mind, then she could figure out what happened. She could find her brothers and get them back. It felt like an invasion of privacy—the idea that Peter knew something about what had happened to her. That he held the secret to those missing months. That this could mean Wendy finding the answer to the questions that had been eating her alive for years.

And at the center of all this was the question: Was he really Peter Pan?

Wendy dug into her small trash can and uncrumpled one of the many drawings she’d made of Peter Pan’s face. She lay on top of the blankets because it was still too hot to sleep under them, then sighed and tried to force herself to calm down. Counting the fairy lights around her window and rolling the acorn between her thumb and index finger, Wendy drifted off to sleep.