Wendy allows herself a moment to tilt her head back and look at the perfect, cloudless sky. The blue is dazzling. She could fall into it, fall and keep falling. At the end she’d find herself on the other side of the world, listening to the mermaids singing in the lagoon. She smooths her hands over her sleeves and her skirt, feeling the hidden pockets secreted away there. It keeps her hands from shaking.

She stops just short of the table and John rises to meet her. His expression is practiced, a veneer of calm plastered over nerves. In reality, there is nothing easy about him at all. Wendy makes a quick inventory of all the things hidden inside her clothes— buttons, a length of thread, a single page from a newspaper, folded and folded again into a long strip running around her hem. The litany calms her, but she doesn’t return John’s smile.

He kisses her cheek, motioning for her to sit. He’s spent years accusing her of playing make-believe, but here he is acting as though this is an ordinary social visit, as though he’s simply a brother visiting his sister at home.

Wendy keeps her back stiff as she sits. Let John be the one to break the silence. She can see the words piled up behind his pained smile. It gives her a small amount of pleasure, but it’s a scant comfort. The terrible truth of it is, she could walk out the gate with him. All she has to do is lie. Tell John and Dr. Harrington what they want to hear. That Neverland doesn’t exist, that it’s all a story she made up. All she has to do is say she’s sorry and promise never to speak of it again.

“Tea?” John lifts the pot, holding it poised over her cup.

“Please.”

“Two lumps. I remember.” His expression softens.

She wants to be angry with him, but his smile disarms her. Light slants through the leaves, catching his hair, burnishing his glasses, and he is only her brother again, not one of her captors. Buried deep behind his eyes is the ghost of the boy who flew with her, who whooped and hollered at Peter’s side, who played at war and follow the leader.

Wendy opens her mouth and closes it again, searching her mind for something safe to say. If she asks where that little boy went, if any part of him remembers, it will only cause disappointment to crowd his expression.

Behind the shine of his glasses, faint crow’s feet line his skin, and the sight of them takes her by surprise. When did he grow up? When did she? She was so determined to hold onto the boy John was—the one who flew with her through the stars—that she utterly missed it.