Wendy moves away from the wall to sit at Tiger Lily’s side. After a moment, she puts her arm around her friend’s shoulders and draws her close. It’s easier to touch her now without feeling that shudder of fear. Tiger Lily rests her head against Wendy; it weighs almost nothing.

“Before the pirates, I used to think nothing could ever die in Neverland, but…” Tiger Lily holds her arms out in front of her, letting her cracked skin speak for her.

“You’re not…” Wendy starts, but she swallows the words, a painful lump in her throat. Whatever she could say would be a lie. Tiger Lily isn’t dead, but she isn’t alive either. They were the same age when Wendy first came here. Tiger Lily isn’t the girl Wendy left behind, but she isn’t a full-grown woman either. She’s something else.

“What about the mermaids?” Wendy asks instead.

“Peter.”

Tiger Lily tenses, and Wendy hears the shift in her already pained voice, as if Peter’s name hurts her more than other words. What were he and Tiger Lily to each other before Wendy arrived? After she left? For Peter to wound Tiger Lily like this, he must have cared for her once very much.

“Peter forgot the mermaids, so they wasted away,” Tiger Lily says, lifting her head from Wendy’s shoulder.

“He forgot?” Wendy can’t fathom it, but at the same time, she can.

It wasn’t even malice, just simple neglect. A boy leaving his toys out in the rain, not caring if they rot or spoil. Callous too, changing so any gust of the wind might carry him off in another direction, never once looking back at what he left behind.

Despite Tiger Lily’s words, Wendy’s mind circles back to guilt. If she’d stayed, could she have kept Peter from getting wrathful and bored? Could she have gathered the fraying threads of Neverland and kept them together, their colors bright? And even if she could have, should Peter’s whims be her burden? He’d wanted her to be his mother, abdicating responsibility so he didn’t have to care, trusting her to catch him if he ever fell.

Mothers are meant to keep their children safe, but also to prepare them for life. Help them grow. What can a mother be to a boy determined to remain perpetually young? Only a shadow, forever chained to him and trailing in his wake, bearing all his hurts so he doesn’t have to.