“Are you terribly cross at me, Wendy?”

“I suppose.” Wendy doesn’t look at him.

Mostly, she’s tired. She asked every boy who came into the tent some variation of the questions she asked Roger, and their answers were all the same. The only ones she didn’t ask were John and Michael. What if she already found forgetting in their eyes? What if John and Michael couldn’t remember their parents? She’s already found that if she doesn’t concentrate, she starts to forget home, or ever being any place other than here. So she didn’t dare ask, afraid of what the answer would be.

“Come with me.” Peter seizes her hand suddenly, startling her and pulling her to her feet. He grins at her, the glint in his eyes promising adventure, and just like that, she’s forgiven him, wanting to follow him wherever he might go. “I promised you a secret and I’ll show you now since you were so good about fixing all my soldiers up. It’s a really good secret, too. I’ve never showed it to anyone before.”

NEVERLAND – NOW

Wendy braces herself and crawls inside the torn ship. Despite knowing it to be grounded in sand, she half expects the deck to sway beneath her, timbers creaking as Hook leans over her, his posture designed to intimidate. She can’t help straining after the sound of shouting voices, the lines groaning, and the sails snapping in the wind. The other half of her expects skeletons like the bones littering the lagoon, but the ship is eerily empty, eerily still.

The ship’s interior is largely intact, only tilted askew. The mermaids in the lagoon, as horrible as their deaths are, at least those are deaths Wendy can understand. Here, it’s as though she can feel the missing crew moving around her, as though at any moment one of Hook’s pirates might brush against her sleeve hurrying from one end of the deck to the other. She doesn’t believe in ghosts, not the kind that haunt houses and ships. Yet, as a girl she saw an impossible monster with dark mottled skin and slavering jaws rise from the waves to snap at Hook’s remaining hand. She’s met mermaids; she can fly. So why not ghosts, too?

If Hook were here, would he still seem a villain to her eyes? As a child, she’d failed to see the truth of Peter, or even consider there might be more to him than his games and bright smiles. Had she misjudged his greatest enemy as well? Might she see a flicker of desperation in Hook’s eyes? Fear? Wendy can only imagine what his life in Neverland must have been, a grown man trapped by the whims of an impetuous child, as subject to Peter’s quicksilver moods as the tides and the winds and the weather.