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.”