She lifted the first letter, unfolding it with care. She’d read, and Ned had watched her, pacing occasionally, and occasionally still, restless fear shivering beneath his skin. The letters were written by Ned, from the trenches in Verdun, addressed to someone named Henry. As the letters named shared memories, Wendy came to understand Henry had been a school friend of Ned’s. And reading on, in wonder, she had learned how time had transformed Henry and Ned into something else, something far more than friends.

Periodically, Wendy had looked up to see Ned almost mouthing silently, as if reading along with her words etched on his heart.

“My father tried to burn them,” Ned said as she set the last letter down.

The reading had left Wendy feeling wrung out. It had already been late when they’d entered the bedroom and now, beyond the windows, dawn had already begun to blush the edges of the sky. She’d read the whole night through.

“Were they never sent?” Wendy’s heart had ached, thinking of Ned—a man she barely knew then—so lost in love. She could scarcely imagine how it must have been for him, love twisted into a source of shame, forced to bury his secret, never allowed to simply be.

“They were sent. Henry wrote letters in return.” Ned’s voice had broken then, not his accustomed stutter, but something more raw and wounded. He hadn’t looked at her but out at the rising sun. “Those letters, his letters, I burned myself. To keep them safe. Henry… passed away recently. Complications from pneumonia. His sister returned these letters to me. I don’t know if she ever read them, but my father found the package and…”

Ned shrugged, an inelegant and pained motion, bringing his shoulders up in bony defense against the world. But when he’d spoken Henry’s name, when he’d told Wendy the truth of him, Ned hadn’t stuttered at all.

In that moment, Wendy had understood his father’s desperation for Ned to marry, why Ned had agreed to marry a woman like her, sight unseen. She’d thanked him for his secret, and promised to keep it. In return, over the next several days, she’d given him St. Bernadette’s, and everything that had happened to her there. While she’d maintained the fiction of the Spanish flu with Ned’s father, she had given Ned as much of the truth as she could—Jamieson and Dr. Harrington, the tub of ice water and her shaved scalp. She’d given him everything except what had sent her there in the first place. She’d given him everything except Neverland, and Peter, saying only that there had been a time in her life when she couldn’t tell truth from made-up stories, but all of that was behind her now.