Wendy glances toward the hall. She won’t have the house to herself for much longer. All the truths will have to come out of her soon.

She looks at her hands. The minor cuts and scratches she and Jane both received fleeing the cave, the ones Wendy barely felt at the time, are almost gone. It’s likely they won’t even leave scars. She should be relieved. Instead, there’s only a kind of hollow numbness. It isn’t like the hollowness she lived with for years, the sense of something missing where Peter tore her memory away. This is the ache of a thing she knows should be there and now is gone, like a trinket or a photograph meant to sit on the mantelpiece, broken beyond repair.

The last two nights, Wendy has sat at the window long after everyone else went to bed, straining to pick out the second star to the right from the sky’s darkness. All the stars look the same to her now, and she’s searched within herself too, reaching after the ragged fragments of Neverland. She can’t feel it anymore. It isn’t gone, but she can’t touch it. Either it’s changed, or she’s changed, or both. Either way, a door has closed, and she fears no amount of picking at the lock will ever open it to her again.

Even the memories that sustained her all through her time at St. Bernadette’s have begun to fracture. When she closes her eyes now, she sees Tiger Lily burning. She sees Peter with his tattered shadow trailing behind him, monster and boy rolled into one. She chose Jane, and she would never choose differently given a thousand lifetimes, but that doesn’t ease the hurt.

Some part of her always believed Neverland would be there for her forever, an escape if she ever needed it. Now that way is barred to her, and she must live from here on out in one world alone.

Outside, trees stir against a clouded sky. Despite the threat of rain, Ned and Jane went for a walk. Wendy doesn’t blame either of them for not wanting to be cooped up in the house with her. Ned has been patient with Jane, but Wendy knows it must be a strain on them both. She’d gently explained that Jane had been frightened, that she needs time, and that she will talk to Ned when she is ready, but the hurt in Ned’s eyes as she’d said it had almost undone her.

The truth had almost come rushing out then, but she’d been a coward. What if Ned doesn’t believe her? And what if he does? How will their lives change?