Wendy thinks of Elizabeth, John’s young bride, impending motherhood just beginning to show in the slight curve of her belly and the glow of her skin. She’s seen the adoration in her sister-in-law’s eyes when she looks at John, but worry still shadows John’s brow. What if he could bring his child here, hold his or her hands as they splashed together in the tide?

The impossible simplicity of it hurts. Neverland isn’t what she once believed it to be, an escape, a cure for all ills. As children, they ran away here without even any troubles to escape from, and wasn’t it Neverland itself that left her scarred? The memory she couldn’t shake that caused the rift between herself and her brothers in the first place? And now it’s put her daughter in danger.

Wendy shakes herself. She’s been stalling, putting off her search. What if she can’t find Jane? What if Neverland keeps her hidden? Or what if she finds her and it’s too late? There’s a pull to this place, an allure Wendy can’t fully explain. It’s why even when she chafed under Peter’s rules, she longed to stay forever. Peter had made it easy to forget so many things—his unfair rules, the small cruelties she’d witnessed among the boys, even her home. There were times with Peter when London felt like a distant dream, when returning to her parents felt like the lie, and Neverland where she truly belonged. Even now, she feels the subtle pull, the way she’d wanted to run on the sand and forget everything else, even her mission to save Jane. What will Neverland do to her daughter? What if Jane forgets her, forgets Ned, forgets herself? What if when Wendy brings her home, Jane sickens the way Wendy herself did as a child, rages against London as her home, breaks her bones insisting she can fly?

Wendy should have spent every night arming her daughter against the day Neverland came for her instead of telling her half-truths couched as fairy tales.

She shades her eyes, peering down the curving length of beach. Just before the land dips out of sight, the prow of a ship juts up toward the sky, the angle of it all wrong. Behind her, a spire of rock rises from the trees, which are a scatter of deciduous, conifer, and tropical all mixed together. Above the trees, it seems for a moment that a ribbon of darkness drifts against the sky. Wendy squints, trying to see better. A murmuration of starlings? No. Smoke. Like something at the center of the island burning.