Wendy clamps her arms by her side, refusing to let one turn traitor and reach toward Peter. She is no longer the heartbroken girl left behind. She is what she has made of herself over the years. She held onto the truth, even when Michael and John forgot. She survived being put away for her delusions, survived the injections, calmatives, and water cures meant to save her from herself. She fought, never stopped fighting; she refused to let Neverland go.

It’s been eleven years since St. Bernadette’s, with its iron fences and high walls, full of frowning nurses and cruel attendants. A place meant to make her better, to cure her, though Wendy knows she was never sick at all. And here is the proof, standing before her, on the end of her daughter’s bed.

Wendy straightens, hardening the line of her jaw, and meets Peter’s eye. In the last eleven years she’s built a life for herself, for her husband and her daughter. She is not that lost and aching girl, and Peter has no power over the Wendy she’s become.

“Peter—” Wendy hears her own voice, stern, admonishing. The voice of a mother, but not the kind Peter ever wanted her to be.

Before she can get any farther, Peter shakes his head, a single sharp motion, dislodging her words like a buzzing gnat circling him. His expression is simultaneously bored and annoyed.

“You’re no fun.” He spins as he says it, a fluid, elegant motion. Peter blurs, and Wendy thinks he’s about to leave, but instead he seizes Jane’s hand. “Never mind. I’ll take this Wendy instead.”

Peter leaps, yanking Jane into the air. Jane lets out a startled cry, and Wendy echoes it—a truncated burst of sound. She isn’t quick enough to close the space between them as Peter dives for the window, Jane in tow. Instead, Wendy falls forward, bashing her knee painfully and catching herself on the window sill.

Wendy’s fingertips brush Jane’s heel and close on empty air. Peter spirals into the night, a cock’s crow trailing in his wake, so familiar, so terrible it overwhelms her. Wendy doesn’t hear if her daughter calls for her; the only sound in the world is the ringing echo of Peter’s call as two child-sized figures disappear against a field of stars.

LONDON 1917

“What is this place?” Wendy asks as the hired car comes to a halt outside a massive iron gate surrounded by a dense green hedge too tall to see over.

Visible through the gate, a long path of crushed stone leads to an imposing building, brick facade and blank-eyed windows glaring out at them. John sighs, his voice tight.

“This is St. Bernadette’s, Wendy.”