She meets Jane’s gaze. Even in the darkness, Jane sees the gravity in her mother’s expression. She feels it too. Regret, not just for what has passed but what will pass. Tucked up in her bed, Jane is suddenly on the edge of a threshold. Once she passes it, there will be no going back. Her mother is prepared to treat her as an adult, and it hurts her to do so. Is this what Jane wants? She almost opens her mouth to take it back, but she closes it again, presses her lips into a determined line, waiting for her mother to speak.

And she does. She speaks of a night when she was not much older than Jane and a boy came to her window holding a shadow in his hands and asking her to sew it back on. She unfolds a tale Jane can scarcely believe, not for the fantastic idea of traveling to another world, for she’s done that herself, but for what came after. How her mother was disbelieved. Locked away. Punished. All because she refused to deny Peter. When she came out of the place where she was kept, secrets were all her mother knew. Jane hears the pain in her mother’s voice—the places where it grows rough and breaks. She blames herself for Jane being stolen.

It’s too much. Jane is a vessel, overfull, on the point of flooding. Her head aches and she feels displaced—not the way it felt with Peter’s strange, sticky-sweet tea, but as though she’s been crying for hours and it’s left her hollow inside. Only her eyes are dry, burning in the dark as she tries to hold onto everything her mother has told her and make sense of it.

And the words aren’t even done yet. Her mother tells Jane of Peter’s true shadow, of sewing it back on, and making the boy and the monster into one. She tells her of making death in Neverland real.

At last, when her mother has run out of words, she lifts a hand and places it on Jane’s own. Jane doesn’t pull away, she’s too stunned.

“I know I’m asking too much of you, Jane, to take all of this in at once. But you’ve been there. You met Peter. You know.” Her mother’s voice is soft, and there’s a weary slant to her shoulders.