Holly exhales hard. “What about you?”
“I’m perfectly safe, my darling. I’m a woman over a certain age. I might as well be invisible.”
Holly starts to protest. Her mother is still beautiful, and even if she weren’t, she’d still be vulnerable, especially in that neighborhood. But Jane puts a hand up. “You can’t understand what I mean. Not yet. You’re too young. But if you’ll let me help you, I promise to curtail my . . . nocturnal adventures. For now. How’s that?” She sips her tea.
“What do you propose?”
“I’ve been searching for him for years. No one alive has studied Peter more than I have, and I swear, I’ve been within a hairsbreadth of him more times than I could count. He’s been at the window—I could feel him there—but he didn’t want me. Once, he must have wanted you. If we work together—if we go to the places I’ve found, together—perhaps he’ll show himself.”
“And what do you want in return?” Holly asks. With Jane, there is almost always a quid pro quo.
“To see him. Talk with him.” Jane looks out the window, although it is so dark out there’s nothing to see. “Perhaps to ask him why he never came back. Not for me.”
There’s such longing on Jane’s face that Holly can barely look. She has to wrap her own arms around herself for comfort. Has her mother ever wanted anything else as much in her life? Did she ever feel that way about Holly, about her father? And what would Jane do if she knew the real reason Peter has stayed away all these years?
Holly doesn’t want to think about it.
“I suppose,” she says. If her mother is going to look for Peter anyhow, it would be safer for everyone if Holly can keep an eye on her. But she won’t tell Jane about Christopher. There’s a strict line the Darlings aren’t supposed to cross when it comes to talking about their problems with outsiders, particularly those affiliated with the police or the papers. And Christopher skates perilously close to it. And then there’s the oddity of his name, of his arm. It makes her uneasy, and Jane would demand answers Holly can’t give. So she’ll keep him to herself. For now. “We can try it.”
“Do you really think he has Eden?”
Holly nods. “There’s no way Eden could have left Cornwall on her own. Even if she did wake up on her own, why wouldn’t she stay? Why wouldn’t the nurses notice? And she has no money, no way of getting around. She had to have assistance. Peter is the logical choice.”
“It might help,” Jane says slowly, “if I knew why he came for you. It might help us find Eden. Or draw Peter out.”
They’ve never talked about it directly. And Holly can’t tell Jane the whole truth, but she can tell her pieces. “It’s not like the stories. It’s not innocence that draws him. When Peter came to me, it was after . . . after Robert and Isaac.” It hurts to say their names. “I was at the end. I wasn’t sure I could go on.” Something occurs to her. “The night he came to Grandma Wendy, wasn’t she upset as well?”
“Yes. She’d been banished from the nursery, remember? Condemned to grow up. It was to be her last night there. She’d sleep in her own room after that.”
Holly thinks of the leather album she’d found in the attic, all those pictures of Wendy and a man with his face cut out. She’s sure now that there was more to Wendy’s story, secrets that her grandmother kept. Reasons Peter came for her that had nothing to do with a last night in the nursery, but with moving to a room where she’d be alone. “Maybe it’s not the innocence, it’s the loss of it.”
Jane leans forward, clearly intrigued. “You think he’s drawn to emotions?”
Holly hesitates. “I think he’s drawn to pain. That could be what happened in Cornwall. If Eden woke up after all these years and found herself alone, even if it was only for a short time, she might have despaired. She might have thought she’d lost everything, and that’s what drew him in. And he’s connected to our family, to the Darlings. Maybe he can somehow sense our feelings, the way sharks sense blood.”
“Not a very flattering interpretation. He must have changed terribly from what by all accounts was an enchanting child. But then again, I had no idea he could grow older.”
“The story never says he can’t grow older,” Holly says. “Only that he can’t grow up.”
“Fascinating,” Jane muses. “I’d never thought of that.”