Is that why she was so sick when she first returned home? Her body rebelling, as if a piece of her had been cut away, a feverish infection come to rest in its place?

She can’t help but wonder—what would it be like if she’d stayed? If, like Peter, she’d refused to grow up? She could have spent a lifetime breathing this air. Running and jumping and flying. She would never have known the horrors of St. Bernadette’s. And she never would have known the new weight of Jane in her arms, rocking her to sleep and murmuring lullabies.

Her pulse falls out of time with the tide, beating a more complicated rhythm—half love, half fear. Wendy unlaces her boots, strips off her stockings, and steps gingerly onto the sand. It’s cool against her soles, just the right firmness for building sandcastles. This is the place her heart belongs; this is the place that stole her daughter away.

The first time she was here, everything seemed uncomplicated. And now? Is this what growing up means, the thing that terrifies Peter so? As a child she only saw bright colors, pure sunlight, or utter dark. All of Neverland is built around those stark contrasts—the sun becoming the moon in the blink of an eye, the sharp demarcation between beach and forest, Hook and his pirates versus Peter and his boys.

A tremor passes through her, and for a moment Wendy wants that surety again, the world flattened to black and white, right and wrong. She has the urge to turn a cartwheel on the sand, pound her feet along the line of surf and let the years fall away as she runs. Instead, she wiggles her toes, burrowing them deep before spreading her arms wide and twirling. Her shawl flares, the trees and sky, the ocean and the shore, blurring into one.

When she stops, she’s dizzy. The waves tumble smoothed stones and leave behind a delicate lace of sea foam. Nothing can ever be as simple as merely good and bad again.

She thinks back on the beach holiday she took with Ned and Jane in Brighton when Jane was six years old. Wendy pictures her daughter running along this shore instead of that one, chasing seabirds, her footprints tracking wildly across the sand. She pictures her pausing to dig for shells, trying to uncover the secret homes of tiny, scuttling crabs. She imagines Ned’s fond smile, his cheeks coloring with a day of wind and sun, Jane’s fingers sticky with melting ice cream as memory and imagination bleed into one. The ache is nearly too much. She should be sharing this moment with them. Her family. Or, she should have shared it with them long ago, the day she agreed to marry Ned, the day her daughter was born.