Except her happiest thought is also her most terrible—the memory of holding Jane for the very first time. The sweet, blood-sticky weight of her, red-faced and crying, placed into Wendy’s arms. Jane had Ned’s hair then, just a few strands of it plastered dark against her still-soft skull. In that moment, love had cracked Wendy open wide, leaving room for fear to slip in. Loving something means having something to lose.

It’s a truth Wendy has known since she lost Neverland, since Michael went to war and came home with ghosts in his eyes, since their parents boarded a ship doomed to sink. And oh, how much sharper that knowledge became when she first held Jane.

How did her own mother feel all those years ago, entering the nursery to find not one but all three of her children gone? If she’d survived, maybe Wendy could have found a way to ask her, and to find out whether she too had been terrified when Wendy was first born. But she’d had no one to ask about being a mother, no one to warn her of all the ways it could make and unmake her heart in a single breath—watching her daughter take her first steps, watching her trip and fall.

Had she and John and Michael even thought, as children, what their grand adventure would do to their parents? No, they’d been callous and cruel. They hadn’t looked back even once as they’d flown in Peter’s wake. And when they’d returned, Wendy’s insistence on a grand adventure, her desire to return to that wonderful land that couldn’t possibly exist. What must that have done to her parents’ hearts, not knowing how their children might have been hurt, where they’d gone? Finding their daughter, even returned to them, suddenly transformed into a stranger.

Wendy herself had thought nothing of that then, how she made her parents and her brothers’ lives more difficult. She had thought only of freedom as she leapt through the nursery window that night, of the chance to perhaps be something more than a second mother to her brothers, even for a little while.

Then they’d arrived in Neverland and she’d discovered a whole new set of rules, changing at Peter’s whim, and he’d wanted her to be a mother to all of his boys, not just Michael and John. Even so, she’d still ached to return. Why? Was it that the good had outweighed the bad, or was it that she’d left a piece of herself behind? Something unfinished, undone?

Wendy peels her fingers from the window frame, takes a breath, empties her mind of everything but Jane, and lets go.