“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.
But in the moments that followed, the boy felt himself alive. No longer did he feel as though he were in a waking dream. He began to collect the pieces of his fragile heart, and though some would always be missing, there were enough of who he once was to fight . . . to go on.
Epilogue
IT’S A BLUSTERY WINTER DAY when we brave the drifting snow of a French cemetery. We find Rowan’s brother deep within a field of crosses as white as the snow that drifts around them, and at the sight of Michael’s name, Rowan crumples to his knees.
I follow him down more slowly, no longer feeling the blistering wind that bites at my cheeks, or the damp cold that creeps up my legs. I’m not sure he even knows I’m here.
He’s been practically silent for weeks, and he’s silent now as he stares at the barren stone, his face creased with regret and pain, his shoulders rising and falling with the effort not to cry out. His arm—the one that had once been so alive with Fey enchantment in Neverland—hangs stiff and heavy at his side.
We tried to talk him into wearing a different prosthetic, one that’s lighter and more useful, but he wouldn’t listen. Once we returned it to him, he refused anything but the heavy piece of dead metal that had been his constant companion for so long. It seems so unfair—with all he’d already lost—for him to lose the magic of that as well. I catch him looking down at the lifeless fist occasionally, but I never know what to do for him. Just as I don’t know what to do as we kneel before Michael’s grave.