The thought is idle. Wendy’s mind doesn’t rebel as much as it should. Here, now, at the end of all things, she is calm, filled with purpose. Peter stiffens, his breath quickening, but neither he nor the shadow resist her when she reaches for it. Touching it is like plunging her hand into icy water. The cold burns, but she’s felt worse. She will survive this too.

Wendy tugs the shadow closer. The weight of a beast so huge should overwhelm her, but it flows over her hands and arms, rippling yet remaining solid. It is everything, and it is nothing at all. A lifetime ago, in the nursery, Wendy remembers how Peter shrieked when the needle first touched his skin. She remembers the moments before she made her first tentative stitch, matching up the ragged ends of the shadow with Peter’s foot, and how it hadn’t seemed to fit at all.

She’d only been a child, and it seemed so natural then, tugging at the strange un-substance, stretching it to fit while Peter waited impatiently. She’d even teased him, asking how a boy could lose a shadow in the first place.

“Oh, lots of ways,” he’d replied. The response she’d taken for airy at the time is unnerving now, and she sees it edged with a smile less coy and more sinister. She thinks, too, of the bones in the cave, and Peter’s dismissal of them being someone. Could he have stolen a shadow from another boy? And if he had, what would that theft do? She imagines a Lost Boy being lost in more than just name, separated from himself and wasting away, unraveling as the shadow Peter had first demanded she sew to his feet did as soon as they arrived in Neverland. How many boys over how many years?

“You’ll be our mother when it’s all done?” Peter had asked, once she’d gotten the shadow to behave, once he’d stopped his whining and begun to watch her work with interest.

Though her stitches were clumsy and uneven, at least it grew easier without his squirming around so, though she’d still had to chide him for fidgeting.

“I suppose.” She’d barely paid attention to the question; it had all seemed a game—a boy who could fly, who appeared at the window in the middle of the night, promising adventure.

“Could you love a boy without a shadow?” The question strikes Wendy now as it didn’t then—again the slyness, the way Peter lowered his lids, his lashes almost touching his cheeks, and looked at her from beneath them.

“I suppose,” she’d answered again, tongue between her teeth, concentrating.

“Because it might come undone again, but if you were our mother you’d have to love me anyway, wouldn’t you? Even if I was bad?”