Wendy tries to picture the captain alone in his cabin, head heavy, breathing out smoke. The wavering light of a candle would make his shadow tremble as he tried to forget, tried to dream, tried to sleep. Wendy passes her gaze over the cabin walls again. The room seems smaller than when she entered, the air heavy, tainted and close. Redolent with ghosts. She can’t stay here.

As Wendy climbs out of the captain’s cabin, she moves with less caution. What if Hook never belonged here either, as much Peter’s captive as Wendy and her brothers were his? Could he have been an actual sea captain once, a merchant, a soldier with a whole life beyond Neverland? If Hook had come from somewhere else, a place like her own England with real war and death, would this place have seemed like a paradise to him at first? Or would it have seemed a mockery of the real world with its violence and wars?

It had certainly felt like a paradise to Wendy’s own young eyes even though she hadn’t been escaping anything. She and John and Michael had been happy, with parents who loved them. The terrible things hadn’t come until later—their parents’ deaths, St. Bernadette’s, the war. If Peter had given Jane a choice, rather than simply snatching her hand, would she have flown away as easily as Wendy, Michael, and John?

Even now, she remembers clearly—there wasn’t a moment of hesitation. Peter held out his hand, and Wendy took it, Michael and John at her heels. She hadn’t spared a thought for consequences, the way her mother would feel, whether her brothers might be in danger. It had all been a grand adventure, a game, just like Peter and his boys playing at war.

She remembers the day Michael, just after his eighteenth birthday, but still very much a boy, returned to the house, papers in hand, to tell Wendy and John he had enlisted and was going to war for real. There’d been a shine in his eyes, a kind of fever Wendy couldn’t understand. Had the war too seemed like a grand adventure? It was how most people had spoken of it early on; a lark, an assured victory, and certain to be over by Christmas.