He remembered everything, then. In that frightful moment, his fierce heart broke. . . .
I WAKE TO THE ICY kiss of snow on my cheek. My hair is damp, and my body aches from its awkward position on the cold ground. In the distance, the sounds of the city wash over me. Above, the stars hold a steady, unflinching vigil. All at once, the memory of what happened and my own bone-deep regret flood through me. And it’s only the sound of a weak, rattling moan nearby that urges me to do something other than give in to the icy cold.
Hours later, when the wailing sirens have stopped and the doctors have decided that I will be okay, my mother finds me. She perches carefully on the edge of the narrow hospital bed, her usually wild red hair tied back in a braid and her face as drawn and tired as I’ve ever seen it. When she sees me stirring, she takes my hand in hers carefully, like I’ll shatter if jostled too much.
“I thought I’d lost you.” Her hands are cool and welcoming as they feel my brow and brush the flopping hair back from my face. “I thought they’d finally won.”
I want to say a million things. I want to apologize for all the times I thought she’d lost her mind. I want to rail and scream at her for what she did to me. In the end, what I’ve lost is too great, and all I can do is cry huge body-wracking sobs that shake me to my core and leave me feeling emptied out as she holds me tight. Even after the last of my gasping sobs have eased, it still takes a few minutes before I feel like I can speak without losing it again. “All those years, all those moves. You could have told me. You should have told me.”
She brushes my hair back. “Your father thought we could protect you. And I thought you deserved a chance at normal—a chance not to let what you were determine everything.”
“So my father really did leave to protect us? He really knew about me—what I was?”
“He arranged everything before he left us. He thought he could draw off the danger somehow if he wasn’t around, but”—my mom’s lips press together—“none of those loyal to him have heard from him in years.”
All at once the immensity of my mother’s loss—of both our losses—overwhelms me, and I start sobbing all over again.
It’s much later when I finally find the words to tell her everything that happened—how we were taken, how I found a way back, what I left behind. And when my story is spun out, when there’s nothing else for us to say, I take a deep breath and ask the question I’ve been wondering—and afraid to ask—since I awoke. “Did Rowan make it?”
Her expression is guarded. “He’s had a couple of transfusions already, but they think he’ll be okay . . . eventually.”
I sit myself up in the narrow hospital bad. “I need to see him.”
“You need to rest,” my mom says, sounding more like a mother than she ever has before.
“I’ve got an entire lifetime to rest.” Somehow the thought is not comforting. “I need to see him.” I need to make sure he is real, whole. That I haven’t lost him, too. “Please.”
She gives me the look she usually reserves for blank canvases, but in the end she relents and gets the nurse to wheel me down to the ward where Rowan is being monitored.
“Do they know who he is?” I ask once the nurse leaves us alone.
“Papers have been arranged.” My mom bites her lip, a sure sign she’s uncomfortable. “Not many knew what your father was,” she said. “But there were those who wanted to see his world united once again. Those who have helped to protect us over the years.”
“The landlord?” I ask.
She gives a small nod. “Not all my commissions knew who we were. But things had gotten more dangerous.”
I let out a shaking breath, understanding why. It must have been after Fiona learned how the Queen was being kept. I would have been hunted by Light and Dark alike, then.
Rowan’s room is silent except for the rhythmic beep of the monitors and the soft shushing whir of his oxygen. He seems shrunken in the narrow bed. Without his ship around him, he looks incredibly ordinary and incredibly young. “When will he wake up?”
“He’s been through a lot,” my mom tells me. “You can’t expect too much too soon.”
For once I’m thankful to have the mother I do. I’m glad I didn’t have to worry about thinking up a lie to explain him or what he is to me now. That will come later, with everyone else. “Would you give me a minute with him?”
I can tell she wants to argue, but she doesn’t. Instead, she gives me a kiss on the forehead and tells me I have five minutes.
His breathing is shallow but steady, and I notice he looks better than when he was unconscious in the snow. He isn’t exactly well, but he no longer has the bluish tinge to his skin that had me pulling myself out of my own despair and screaming for help.
I reach out and take his hand in mine, stroking the back of it as I watch him sleep amid the blinking monitors and maze of tubes. After a few minutes I start to pull away, but his grip tightens and his eyes flutter open.
“Gwendolyn?”
I lean in closer so he can see me. “How are you feeling?”
“Where am I?”
I’m not sure what to say, but a second later, he notices the fluorescent lights and the strange machines, and I don’t have to explain. His gaze darts wildly about the room, trying to take everything in as he struggles to sit up.
“Shhh, you have to settle down before the nurse comes.” I place my hands on his shoulders and try to steady him in the bed.
His eyes are still wild with panic. “Why?” he asks in a shaky voice, and I know he isn’t asking about the nurse.
“You were dying, and you were the last person I could save.”
He stops struggling then and slumps back against the pillow, looking away from me. “Better to have let me die.”
“Don’t”—I cup his face with my hands and force him to face me—“don’t you dare say that. Not after all we’ve been through.”
“I told you, lass—”
“I couldn’t leave you,” I cut in. “I couldn’t leave you to die there. It wouldn’t have helped anyone.” Then I explain what happened—how the Queen was killed, how Pan died, how Neverland had started to fall apart.
He hesitates. “Olivia?”
“She saved me. Or maybe she just did it to avenge Pan, but we wouldn’t be here without her. I couldn’t save her, though.” I shake my head, unsuccessful in my attempt to will away the image of my friend cracked like porcelain doll, her eyes glassy and far away.
He pulls my hand away from his face and places a kiss on the center of my palm before he intertwines my fingers. “I’m not part of this world anymore, Gwendolyn.”
“You are now.”
“I don’t belong here. . . .” he protests, his eyes still warily taking in the blinking lights and plastic tubes that surround him.
“You survived in Neverland,” I say with a teary sniff. “The twenty-first century is going to be easy.”
His mouth flattens into an unhappy line, but he doesn’t argue. Or agree.
“We’ll figure it out. Together,” I promise.
His brow creases, but he doesn’t argue. “My arm?” he doesn’t look at the empty spot under the covers where his arm should have been.
“I don’t know.”
My mom peeks into the room at that moment. “It’s time.”
“Do you know what they did with his arm?” I ask her.
He eyes glance between us, appraising our closeness. “I’m not sure.”
“We’ll find it,” I assure him. “And then we’ll figure out everything else.”
“You need to let him rest,” my mom says. I think she can sense how badly I want to kiss him. If she thinks her presence will be a deterrent, she’s wrong. After all we’ve been through and all I lost, I refuse to wait another moment.
I lean forward and press my lips gently to his. It’s not more than a peck, and he doesn’t return it.
“Sleep well,” I tell him, backing away. “I’ll see you tomorrow.”
I don’t need to look at my mom to sense her questions, just like I don’t need to look back at Rowan to feel the intensity of his gaze following me out.
• • •
It takes a couple of weeks, but we eventually get Rowan out of the hospital. Thanks to the documents our landlord arranged, he becomes a new person—at least on paper. Behind those dark eyes, though, he’s the same as ever. Still, there are moments I can’t help but worry he’s left part of himself behind. That he’ll never really forgive me for bringing him back.
For weeks he’s mostly silent, watching his new world with wary eyes. I don’t blame him one bit. When I finally came to, I’d hoped that I had only lost days, maybe weeks. But I later discovered I’d lost more than a year to Neverland. There were moments in those first days when I was almost as unsettled by the subtle changes to my world as Rowan must have felt. I had a new president, but whole countries had changed and rearranged themselves in the time he was gone, including his own.
As we waited for Rowan to be released from the hospital, I read through the papers my mom and the landlord kept that documented our ordeal. It took less than four days for our kidnapping to go from the front page to the inside of the paper. After a few weeks, we were rarely mentioned at all. To everyone but the few who were close to her, Olivia had already been forgotten.
But I hadn’t forgotten, and neither had Olivia’s parents.
I once thought the Fey were cruel with their lives built from nothing more than wanting, but after I returned to my own world, I came to understand they’re not alone. By our very nature, humans are heartless things. The Fey, at least can be excused—their world, after all, wasn’t made from memory. We humans, however, select the memories that suit us to remember and forget the rest—the wars, the tragedies, the lost. Neverland might have helped with the forgetting, but it didn’t create it. That we do well enough on our own.