She leaves the window, pacing through Jane’s room. Her fingers trail over butterflies carefully pinned under glass, over collections of rocks and seashells and leaves, all held in cases of their own. Jane’s books. The globe atop her shelf, marked with pins for all the places her daughter wanted to visit. Of all those lands she dreamed of, Jane couldn’t have pictured Neverland. Wendy should have warned her. She should have…

Wendy lifts a butterfly case. The label is written in Jane’s neat hand—neater than Wendy’s ever was at her age. Holly blue, Celastrina argiolus. Jane caught it on the holiday they took in Northumberland, so excited she’d clutched the jar like a treasure all the way home.

The memory tightens Wendy’s throat, threatening her with tears. She wants to smash the case, smash everything in the room. Instead, she sets the glassed-in butterfly down as gently as she can.

“Come away, darling.” Ned touches her shoulder.

Wendy jumps. She never heard him enter. How long has she been standing here, staring? His hand is warm and strong on her shoulder and she wants to shrug him away, but she forces herself to turn.

Tiny threads of crimson in Ned’s eyes mark his own grief, and the tightness in his posture is unmistakable. Beneath his neatly trimmed moustache, his lips press a thin line. He’s as afraid for Jane as she is, maybe more so, because he understands even less of what’s going on. She should tell him. She should, but she won’t.

“Where’s Mary?” The words emerge sharp, in place of comfort.

Wendy hates herself, but even so she can’t stop herself from looking past Ned’s shoulder as if Mary might appear in the doorway carrying a tray laden with tea. Her pulse catches. Her father-in-law stands there instead, light from the hallway transforming him into an imposing blot of shadow.

“I sent Cook home.” Ned stresses Mary’s title, his tone matched to hers.

Wendy hears the brittleness under it, but she straightens, stepping back an inch as if too much closeness, even between husband and wife at a time like this, might be improper somehow. She cannot see her father-in-law’s face for the light behind him, but she imagines his frown. Wendy knows his opinion of Mary, and she knows it isn’t one Ned shares. Under normal circumstances, he never would have sent her home. He would call her Mary, rather than Cook, and he might be the one to make tea for all three of them as they shared their worries over Jane. But as long as Ned’s father is here, none of that matters.