“Okay, okay,” Peter said, motioning with his free hand for her to keep her voice down. “When I found you, you were in the middle of the woods. I—I don’t know what happened before that.” He hesitated for a moment. “But it was almost dark and you were scared, so I took you back with me to Neverland.”

“Neverland, as in the magical island in the sky, from the stories?” Wendy asked. She was still struggling to accept all of this, but, more importantly, she wanted him to tell her the rest.

Peter squinted. “I guess that’s the easiest way to describe it, yeah.”

“Why didn’t you take us home?”

Another long pause. “I … You didn’t want to go home, you wanted to go with me,” Peter said with a small shrug.

If it weren’t so impossible, it would almost make sense. One of the last things Wendy remembered before the gaping hole in her memory was how, right before she and her brothers went missing, she had gotten into a fight with her father. He’d wanted her to move out of her shared room with her brothers and into her own room. He had told her that it was time for her to grow up and that she couldn’t keep playing make-believe with her brothers all the time.

Wendy remembered being so mad at her father. She knew he thought that was why they’d gone missing, that they had run away because he was splitting them up.

But what about Nana? She had run off into the woods and they had chased her. Wendy remembered that part.

“Having you come to Neverland was great,” Peter continued, quieter. Wendy was very aware of how close he was, the warmth of his hand wrapped around hers. “We went on adventures, you guys got to meet the other Lost Ones, and I got to listen to you tell stories all the time.” He gave her a weak smile, but it quickly faded. “But then a bunch of weird stuff started happening. First, it was just little things. The fairies started getting spooked—they wouldn’t come out and play with us at night anymore. They all hid in the trees. I tried to talk to them, but they wouldn’t tell me what was wrong, like they were too scared to or something.”

Wendy found herself nodding along.

“After you guys came to the island, all of a sudden it started to get harder for me to fly, which had never happened before. The longer you were there, the worse it got. It was like I couldn’t control it anymore. Then, one night, I woke up and my shadow was gone.”

He stopped. Clearly he was expecting some sort of big reaction from her, but Wendy didn’t say a word. She was too busy trying to comprehend it—the magic, the fairies, and Neverland.