Neverland isn’t her home, but is London really her home either? She doesn’t belong with Michael and John, and besides, they ought to have lives of their own. Where then? She wants to say with you—after all, Mary is the only other home Wendy has known—but it seems unfair to need another person so much. Could she be a home for Mary too? Could they need each other enough to make a life away from this place? And even if they could, who would let them? The world is full of men granting and withholding permission, leaving women like Mary and herself to exist by their sufferance alone.

Suddenly, it all feels so hopeless. Wendy shakes her head, letting out something like a laugh.

“Neverland.” She leans her head against the tree and closes her eyes. The harder Dr. Harrington and John worked to take it away from her, the more fiercely she held on, until Neverland became something else entirely. But it isn’t perfect, and it isn’t a home. Because home means family and consequence, and taking the good with the bad. Neverland is simply a place to run away and hide.

Wendy feels around the edges of the hole left inside her, the thing behind the locked door. She’s tired of it. Weary to the core.

“Neverland is a lie.” She opens her eyes and looks at Mary. “I don’t mean it isn’t real, because it is. I mean things there aren’t what they should be. Neverland is a story, a little boy’s idea of pirates and Indians and mermaids. Except Peter isn’t really a boy. He’s something else. I don’t know what he is, but I think he made himself into the idea of what a boy should be, and sometimes that’s a very dangerous thing.”

Wendy takes Mary’s hand, lacing their fingers together and looking at them joined, light and dark.

“What about you,” Wendy asks. She is half afraid of the answer, but she doesn’t know what answer to give to Mary’s question, and so turns it back on her instead. “What would you do if you could leave tomorrow? Where would you go?”

Mary looks startled in her own right, and Wendy’s breath catches a bit, her pulse wanting to go faster. This feels different than the stories they’ve told each other over the years, of what they would do if they ever escaped. Those were mere fantasy, a way to survive. This is frighteningly close to real. Not running away from something, but running to something, a real life, a new home, a different kind of family.

“Would you…” Wendy hesitates. The thought of Mary going back to Canada, an ocean between them, is too much to contemplate, so she asks a different question instead.

“Would you look for the man who married your mother?”