Wendy moves closer, studying them. She thinks of the days she and Mary had spent hidden away in forgotten corners of St. Bernadette’s halls, Mary trading Wendy story for story. Wendy had told stories of Neverland, and in exchange, Mary had told Wendy the Kainai legends her mother passed on to her as a child.

She remembers Jane, standing at the counter in their kitchen, barely tall enough to see its surface, watching Mary knead bread. Mary had told Jane those same stories, sketching pictures in the flour scattering the countertop. Blood Clot Boy, and Napi, the Old Man who first made people, and who tried to steal the Sun’s pants.

A sob catches in Wendy’s throat. The memory is so close, she can feel the heat of the kitchen, smell the baking bread. She’d told her own stories to Jane, stories of the Little White Bird and the Clever Tailor, but she should have told them truer.

She’d told the stories to protect herself, not Jane, reclaiming fragments of Neverland and stitching them into toothless fairy tales to help her daughter sleep at night. The Tailor had sewn stolen feathers into a fabulous coat for the Little White Bird to help him fly faster and higher than all the other birds and win a race. And all the while in Wendy’s mind, she’d held a picture of herself as a child, sewing Peter’s shadow back onto his body.

Wendy breathes out, forcing the ache from her lungs. She blinks back tears, resting her fingers on the painted images on the wall. A ship with full, billowing sails, the mermaids in their lagoon, a boy surrounded by a group of other boys—the only one not casting a shadow. She moves her hand back to the pirate ship, and turns to look at Tiger Lily over her shoulder.

“What happened to them?” Wendy asks.

“They left.” Tiger Lily moves closer.

“What?” The answer startles her, driving all other thoughts from her mind. “How? Where did they go?”

Tiger Lily lifts her shoulders; her body makes a dry cracking sound like logs settling in a fire.

“There was a storm and a tear in the sky. Hook and his ship sailed through.”

“But I saw the shipwreck on the beach. I climbed inside.” Wendy touches the sword at her hip.

The hilt seems almost to shiver beneath her touch. She felt it herself, the haunted air of the ship, the sense of the pirates still there, and yet gone. Hadn’t she even pictured them falling into the sky?