Jocelyn rubbed her eyes, taking in the green forest around her. She sat with her back to a tree, nestled in soft ferns. Filtered rays of the sun paraded up and down on the girl’s comfortably ruined dress. She touched the wilted flower in her buttonhole.

What am I doing here?

Waking in an unfamiliar place can be rather disorienting, or so I’ve been told. It can also be quite entertaining—if you do not happen to be the one experiencing it. My old aunt Sophia was afflicted with bouts of narcolepsy: falling asleep without warning and at the most inopportune times. One minute she’d be chatting away about dress fashions or gunpowder prices; the next she was slumped over, unconscious.

My cousins and I made a bit of sport with the old lady. She would wake to find herself picnicking in a field of flowers, propped up at the tea table entertaining the vicar and his wife, or tucked into a long box, buried six feet under the ground, with only a coffin bell for her amusement—any number of delightful situations. She always had a good laugh, once she finished weeping.

Being of sterner stuff than my aunt Sophia, Jocelyn did not cry out in tearful horror, but she did blink her eyes and wonder. Like a half-forgotten dream, images from the night before surfaced in her mind: the fairy nectar, the dancing…her wish.

She looked around in hopeful anticipation, but Jocelyn was utterly alone.

Stupid fairies, she thought as she stood and kicked the gnarled tree trunk she had rested against. Didn’t I know better than to trust a wish?

The girl got to her feet, looking for some landmark to tell her which way to go. Standing alone in the stillness of the forest, she got a strange feeling. Something was different. There was a scent in the air, familiar to the child but foreign to the Neverland. She closed her eyes and breathed in, trying to remember where she knew it from.

When she opened her eyes, Jocelyn found herself somewhere else entirely. The forest had gone, replaced by a bedroom suite dressed in weathered gold-and-ivory wallpaper. Rich, dark furnishings adorned the space, conveying warmth, wealth, and yet a feeling distinctly feminine. Jocelyn found herself seated upon a stool facing a beautifully carved dressing table. A copy of Gulliver’s Travels lay at the table’s edge. She spied her own eyes in the large mirror before her. They were wide, unbelieving, for she knew this room: it had been her mother’s.

Sir Charles had expressly forbidden Jocelyn from entering Evelina’s old room, so naturally it had become her favorite childhood play place. Oh, how she had loved looking at and trying on the jewels found in the dressing table’s right-hand drawer, imagining them to be stolen treasure. (Of course, as they were gifts to her mother from her father, she was likely correct about that.) She opened the drawer and was delighted to find all her favorites still there. Her fingertips lingered over their glimmering surfaces, though she did not try them on. Instead she turned her attention to the items cluttering the top of the table. In addition to the book, she spied her mother’s heavy silver hairbrush and combs, a billowy powder puff, and several dainty bottles filled with expensive perfumes. Under the girl’s touch each item felt heavy, burdened with stories Jocelyn would never be a part of.

She lifted her favorite bottle, stirring up the dust lying thick upon the cut crystal. Undoing its stopper, Jocelyn recognized the scent she had been unable to place in the forest. She glanced at the mirror and beheld an image of her much younger self trying on the perfume. She watched herself, remembering. She had thought of her mother as she played with her things—wondering what it would be like if Evelina had lived, wondering why she had died, leaving her child behind.

The memory surrounded her, poking at the empty place in her heart. Jocelyn’s eyes stung. She gripped the bottle tightly, the pattern on the crystal biting into her hand. The young girl in the mirror looked up, her eyes shining. She slowly vanished, changing into a reflection of Jocelyn’s current self—older, but still alone.

It was so unfair!

Jocelyn hurled the perfume bottle with all her might, smashing both it and the mirror into a thousand shards. She threw another, and another. In a matter of moments the tabletop was transformed, its once beautiful bottles reduced to shattered glass and pooling liquid. She held the last unbroken one in her fist, her energy drained away. The scent rising from the ruin was too sweet, too strong, and it burned the girl’s throat. Tears threatened, but Jocelyn refused to give in. Instead she let out an angry, frustrated scream. “Why did you leave me behind?” she cried. “I would have gone with you! Why did you leave me alone?” It is a sad fact that the child, though thinking of her mother, could have been addressing either parent.

A cool hand on her shoulder startled the girl. She turned and saw the calm face of a lovely lady. Something about the curve of her cheek and the slight upturn of her nose echoed Jocelyn’s own features. “Mother?” the girl whispered. There was no one else it could have been.

The woman smiled softly down. “Could this be my baby, grown so big at last?”

Things rarely come to pass in the way you imagine them. Jocelyn had often dreamed about what it might be like to meet her mother. Now, given the opportunity, she did not feel at all how she’d thought she would.

“If you hadn’t died, you would know who I am.” She frowned. “You wouldn’t have to ask.”

“Oh, Jocelyn,” her mother said. “Please know that I didn’t want to leave. It was simply my time.”

“I don’t care. You have no idea what it was like growing up with only my grandfather—knowing that no matter what I did, I’d never be as perfect or lovely as you were.” Jocelyn squeezed the bottle in her hand, tempted to hurl it as she had the rest.

“I understand quite a lot more than you think. Remember, your grandfather is my father. I learned to look forward to my own future with nothing more than polite boredom. Without consulting me, he bought a ridiculous ship and sent me out for a pleasure cruise, in order to attract ‘the right sort’ of attention. The only attention it attracted was your father’s. When I saw James for the first time, I knew my future would be something quite different from what my father had planned. I could choose for myself.”

“But you left him, too. That’s what you do. You leave.”

“With your father, life was an adventure, but he was not a benevolent man. He committed many terrible acts in his life—so many, in fact, that wickedness poisoned his very blood. As much as I loved him, it was not easy to live each day under his dark shadow. I didn’t want to leave, but in the end we both agreed it was best.”

“If my father was so wicked, how could you have loved him in the first place? You were so perfect.”

Evelina laughed. “No one is perfect, Jocelyn—certainly not I. In the same way, no one is perfectly terrible, though James would have liked to think that he came close. He had deep feelings: love, loneliness, passion—”

“Disgusting.”

“—but he kept his humanity, truly everything dear to him, locked up tight in an iron box. A box to which, I’m afraid, he refused to share the key.”

A memory itched at the back of Jocelyn’s mind, but she couldn’t quite scratch it.

“When I returned home and learned I would be your mother, it was the happiest time of my life. The last thing I remember is looking into your tiny red face, so strong and new, and knowing that I would never accomplish anything greater. Even though I knew that you would be fine without me, if I had been given a choice, I would never have left you.”

“How could you possibly have known that I would be fine?”

Evelina’s eyes twinkled. “Let’s call it a mother’s intuition. And I can tell you this: you will not only be fine; you will be great. I know it.”

Jocelyn held out the last remaining perfume bottle. “I…I broke the rest. I’m sorry.”

Evelina took it and dashed it to the floor. The bottle shattered like all the others. “I don’t care. They weren’t important. Not like you.” She reached over and cradled Jocelyn in her arms. “I am the one who should be sorry.”

Jocelyn allowed herself to be hugged for a long while before asking, “Can you stay?”

“I wish I could, but even fairy magic cannot bring the dead back to life. However, I can remain in this room for as long as you need. Time will not touch us here.”

Time. Jocelyn thought of the ticking clock buried deep inside the Neverland’s crocodile. All the girl’s problems pressed in. Her father’s request had not yet been fulfilled, her crew was at the mercy of the merciless Captain Krueger, and Roger…Jocelyn shook her head. As much as she felt comforted by her mother, she wondered if she had wasted her fairy wish. “I don’t know what to do.”

“The first step is to decide what you really want.”

“I want to do what my father expects of me.”

“James is dead and expects nothing.” Evelina seated herself on the bed, patting a spot beside her. “What do you want for yourself?”

Jocelyn sat, pulling her bare feet beneath her. “If I don’t finish this business with the crocodile, I will live with the failure my whole life. I want to succeed, but I don’t know if I’m strong enough.”

“You are. You have a power within you even greater than all the magic of the fairies.”

“No offense,” Jocelyn replied. “You probably do know a lot, being from another realm or something, but I’ve met the fairies. You have no idea how powerful they are.”

Evelina laughed. “Oh, Jocelyn, children are ever so much more powerful. The proof is simple. What happens when a child says, ‘I don’t believe in fairies’?”

That Evelina, she was a clever one. She must have known that all children, with the exception of a few addlepated simpletons, can answer that question in their sleep. Listen up, so you can be sure to get it.

“Every time a child says, ‘I don’t believe in fairies,’ a fairy falls down dead,” Jocelyn recited.

“Something similar happens when a child turns that doubt inward. The part of her that can do anything fades away. In time, and fed enough disbelief, it will die.”

Jocelyn wasn’t sure if she agreed, but she listened anyway.

“The crocodile feeds on fear and doubt. A few years ago you would have been able to defeat it without much difficulty, but now more uncertainties have crept in. In order to get what you want, you must find a way to push them back.”

Jocelyn pulled at a ragged thread on her sleeve. “That’s the big secret? Believe in myself and everything will turn out fine? That sounds…stupid.”

Evelina laughed. “That doesn’t make it untrue. Or easy, as I’m certain you will discover. It holds the key to anything you may wish to accomplish, not just defeating the crocodile. You must look within yourself to discover what you really want, believe that you can have it, and not allow anything to keep you from it.” She smoothed a lock of Jocelyn’s hair, tucking it behind an ear. “Rest now. You have a difficult task ahead of you.”

Jocelyn snuggled down into the bed, drowsiness settling over her like a comforting blanket. Her mother’s cool hand caressed her forehead. Evelina began to hum a lullaby, and the girl closed her eyes. When she opened them, she was back in the forest, the stillness only broken by the sweet song of a nightingale.

“Decide what I want. Believe I can have it. Don’t let anything stop me,” the girl repeated to herself as she stood and started up the path.

Jocelyn wanted to rescue her crew and to defeat the crocodile. She was determined to do those things, but there was one thing she needed to do first—something she wanted above all else.

Jocelyn had to find Roger. He might choose to end their friendship, but he would do so remembering her.