“I promise you, Jane, as soon as I’ve spoken to your father, I will never ask for your silence again. You may speak to anyone you choose to about Neverland—your father, Cook, me, even your grandfather.” A look of fear flickers through her mother’s eyes, but she goes on.

“You may ask me any questions you like, and I will always give you the truth. No more secrets. And you may take that truth with you out into the world, anywhere you like, but understand, Jane—it is a choice.”

Her mother increases the pressure of her hands around Jane’s, then lets her go. Jane’s skin chills in the absence of her mother’s touch. She thinks of her mother in the terrible place she described, the asylum called St. Bernadette’s. She understands the choice her mother is giving her, and it’s no choice at all. To tell the truth and be called a liar, or to hold back the truth and lie to everyone she knows.

And it isn’t only herself she has to worry for, but her mother. Jane senses it in the look in her mother’s eyes just now when she mentioned Jane’s grandfather, senses it was there too in the words she overheard between her mother and her father. If she tells the truth, Jane will not only risk hurting herself, she will risk hurting her mother, too.

It isn’t fair, because the world isn’t fair, but perhaps that’s what it means to grow up. Not just the opportunity to learn more about the world, to become a scientist as she’s always dreamed, but to face disappointment, to hold secrets of her own, to choose between right and wrong, trying to do what is best with only her own instinct to go on, even knowing she might fail.

Jane doesn’t want any of this weight, and she isn’t certain what she’ll do with it, but it’s too late not to carry it at all. She has crossed the threshold, and the door is closed behind her. She cannot un-know what she knows, and she hates it. She can’t bring Timothy back. She can’t tell her father the truth when he asks her where she’s been, not yet. She must keep secrets from her uncles, especially her Uncle Michael, because the truth would only hurt them. Worst of all, she cannot trust her mother, not fully, and yet she is the only person Jane can trust. She is the only person Jane can speak freely with, because she is the only one who will understand.