Time surges backwards as Wendy tightens her grip. Peter hasn’t aged a day; he hasn’t changed. She thinks of their positions reversed, Peter looming over her and bellowing in her face, demanding she look at him and look at his shadow. Demanding she love all of him, or not at all. Her fear then turns to anger now.

Keeping one hand on Peter’s ankle, Wendy gets her other hand on the back of his neck. She lets go of his foot, hauling him up like a mother cat would a kitten. Her nails dig into his skin, and she ignores the noise Peter makes as they do. He squirms, but she turns him toward his shadow and thrusts him forward at arm’s length.

“Look at it, Peter. Look at yourself. All of it. You can’t hide from what you are anymore.”

He tries to back away, but Wendy keeps her elbow locked, her fingers at the base of his skull to keep him from turning his head.

“It’s your shadow, Peter. Look at him.”

“You’re lying.” Peter’s voice is small. He tries to pull away, and the piteousness of him almost breaks her, but Wendy keeps her grip firm. “You sewed my shadow back on. Remember, Wendy?”

His voice is a little boy’s. She can almost believe it. For a moment, it is all she believes. She is the monster, not Peter.

“No.” Wendy’s voice quavers, doubting what she knows to be true. Tiger Lily’s stories. The bones in this very cave. Peter himself had called the creature his secret. “He’s yours, Peter. He’s you.”

Her palm slicks with Peter’s sweat, and the sound he makes now is altogether more broken, a panicked hitching of breath, like he can’t catch enough air. Petty triumph fills her. Wendy imagines her own head scraping the cavern ceiling, as obscenely tall and monstrous as Peter seemed to her all those years ago. Instead of snatching memory from him as he did to her, she wants to cram the truth down his throat, fill him with it until he’s bursting.

Wendy yanks him backward, so roughly Peter falls, and she leans over him again, glaring into his face.

“You see?” Her lips pull back from her teeth; it is not a smile. “Do you see now what you are?”

She has no need to hold him anymore. Peter curls in on himself, so much smaller than her, transfixed and still. He is a wounded animal, but even so, Wendy’s anger remains. She pulls it around herself like a cloak, allows herself to feel all of it. Despite the fear in Peter’s eyes, or perhaps because of it, she wants to hurt him.