The whole group pauses, Nolan taking my hand in his. I shake my head.
Victor stares at me, silent for a long beat. “How long?”
“Another ten months,” I reply.
Victor bites the inside of his cheek, pinching his forehead between his fingers. “I’m so sorry. Had I known, I never would have left. I should have never left.”
I offer Victor a gentle smile. “No, I wanted you to leave,” I say. “You’d been in Neverland long enough. Besides, my friends didn’t stop searching for me.”
I regret the words as soon as they leave my mouth—what they imply about Victor. Before I can clarify, we find ourselves at the door of a small cottage on the edge of town.
“Welcome home,” Victor says.
I’m notsure why I expected the Lost Boys’ home to resemble the Den. Though the cabin is made of wood, there is no wood in sight. Every inch of the walls is covered in sketches (I imagine done by Victor—has he perfected that skill in honor of his lost brother?), cheaply woven tapestries that look like they came from the market at the base of the mountain, and an assortment of shelves on which are perched row after row of toys.
So, I suppose there is wood in sight. It just happens to belong to Benjamin’s whittled carvings.
The bits of wall that do peek through the assortment of decorations have been painted blue.
Even the den area is strange, the furniture arranged in a way that almost appears unnatural. I can’t help but wonder if it’s in an attempt to avoid the setup of the furniture in the Den.
“What do you think?” Victor turns and asks.
I smile at him in answer, a mingled pride and sadness leaking into my heart.
Moments later, there’s the scuffling of feet, and a boy walks into the den from an adjoining hallway, wiping his eyes and yawning.
“Who are you talking to?” he asks, but when he sees me, his eyes jolt wide.
“Winds?” Smalls asks, though he’s hardly small anymore.
He’s shot up at least four inches since the last time I saw him, the baby fat he’d kept on his cheeks and around his waist having stretched out with him. Now he’s as lanky as John had been at that age.
I wave at him with a grin.
While I expect him to pounce on me in a hug, instead, he turns on his heel and sprints off down the hallway.
“What did you do to that poor boy to make him run off from you like that?” teases Nolan.
“Yeah, I’d always thought you were the gentle sort,” says Maddox. “Though I suppose I should know by now that’s not the case,” he adds, nudging Nolan’s hook.
I roll my eyes at them both, and listen as a commotion echoes down the hallway where Smalls disappeared.
Moments later, a gaggle of boys appear, and my heart sings.
“It really is her,” says Benjamin, brown eyes wide as he looks me up and down, face breaking into a gregarious grin. “I thought Smalls was pranking us again.”
“Welcome back, Wendy,” says one of the Twins, and I jolt in shock. I almost pass out when the second twin grins and says, “Yeah, what took you so long to find us?”
I blink, sure now that I’m dreaming, as I’ve never heard either of the Twins’ voices except for whispers spoken to one another when they hadn’t realized I’d walked into the room.
“Oh, yeah, they talk now,” says Victor.
“When did that happen?” I murmur to him, hoping they can’t hear.
“As soon as we made it out of the Warping. It was like something in them flipped.”
Something squirms in my gut. There’s been a part of me that, this past year, has worried I made a mistake in getting the Lost Boys out of Neverland, in tricking them into leaving the only home they remember, the guardian they so clearly adored.
