Darling Girl: A Novel of Peter Pan(44)

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Holly heads back to the same section of town she’d explored on her first day. At night, the shadows make it more ominous. Bits of broken glass shine under the streetlights, and every stranger on a corner seems suspicious.

She doesn’t get out of the car, just cruises the streets. Couples stroll through the night, holding hands. A few homeless men sleep in doorways or sit on the sidewalk, cardboard boxes and knapsacks by their sides. None of these people look anything like Peter. None look like Eden.

She parks and waits under an old bridge. It’s darker here, and trash blows into the corners of the supports. She glances at her watch. She’ll give it another twenty minutes before she heads home. She turns off her headlights, lets her eyes adjust to the night.

Shadowy figures come and go, but it’s hard to see. Everyone is beautiful in the dark. Once, she’s certain she’s found him—there’s a flash of golden hair, and a boy with easy grace walks out of the darkness toward a waiting car. Her heart lurches, but when he stops under the streetlight, he’s too young. Jack’s age. Holly’s stomach roils with disgust, then anger as she watches the car drive away. If Christopher Cooke is protecting children like this, she has more understanding of his windpipe-crushing rage.

A few minutes after eleven, she calls it. She wants to be home when Jack comes in. She starts the car, puts it in gear, and is pulling away when something catches her eye. She brakes, watches the figure striding along the sidewalk on the opposite side of the street. It’s lithe and boyish, in a dark jacket and cap. Familiar somehow. She holds her breath, studying, trying to parse out where she knows it from. Could it be . . . and then a beam from the streetlight catches an errant lock of hair. Silver, not gold. Not Jack. Not Peter.

Jane.

She’s nowhere near the restaurant where they ate dinner. Nowhere near home.

What the bloody hell?

Before Holly can do more than gawp, Jane disappears down the Tube entrance.



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Holly guns through several yellow lights and breaks the speed limit, but she makes it to the Tube stop closest to home in record time. Traffic is light, so she double parks. She doesn’t have long to wait. Less than ten minutes after Holly pulls up, Jane hurries out of the station. She doesn’t even look around—that’s how confident she is. She heads straight for home.

Not so fast, Holly thinks.

She lowers the passenger window and calls out. Jane doesn’t hear her, so Holly beeps her horn, a shocking breach of the neighborhood’s etiquette. Jane’s head whips around. To her credit, her eyes widen only fractionally when she sees Holly.

“Hey,” Holly calls. Two can play it cool. “Want a ride?”

Holly expects her mother to say no, but Jane doesn’t. She slides right into the front passenger seat. She doesn’t make excuses about where she’s been. She doesn’t lie. She doesn’t talk at all, not until they’re pulling into the driveway.

“You know,” she finally says, looking down at her hands, “in the stories, it’s always the children who fly off and have adventures. The mothers have to stay home and wait for them to return.” She looks up. “I’m tired of waiting.”

And with that, she goes inside, leaving Holly to put the car away herself.



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When Holly comes in, the house is quiet. Jane must have gone upstairs. Holly, waiting for Jack, finds herself turning her mother’s words over in her mind. Holly’s spent her own fair share of time waiting, of putting her wants and needs on hold to put those of her children first. Hasn’t she? The move to Cornwall, that was all about waiting for Jack to recover. And before that, the time she took off from her research position at the university when the twins were born. She was waiting then too.

But what about New York? an insidious little voice whispers inside her head. You weren’t waiting then, were you? Not for Eden to get better. And not for Jack, either, not really. New York is all about you. Your laboratory. Your work.

It’s not true, she tells herself. She’d fled over the ocean so that Peter couldn’t follow, not for a job opportunity. If she found success there, that was an added benefit, one she couldn’t have predicted. And Darling Skin Care has given her the money to take care of Eden and Jack, the contacts and the equipment and the research to save them, if saving is possible. Staying home and caring for them herself wouldn’t have accomplished anything.

Even so, she’s glad when Jack comes home at the stroke of midnight and she can ask him about his night before he climbs the stairs for bed. It shuts the voice up, for now.

The memories are harder to silence.



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On Eden’s fifth birthday, the library at Grace House looks like a party scene right before the guests arrive. Brightly colored streamers and balloons cover every surface of the room. A Happy Birthday banner hangs over the window. Flowers stand in vases. Music plays from the radio. She’s given the nurses the afternoon off, so it’s just the two of them. She’d wanted to create some sense of normalcy, wanted for one day to pretend her daughter isn’t sick, only sleeping. One day to weigh the decision facing her.

Eden is wearing the blue party gown Holly sent from London last week, and her golden hair has been curled into ringlets. If you didn’t know better, if you could overlook the tubes and IVs and monitors, you might think she was asleep. Pink cheeks, long dark lashes, glowing skin. The picture of health.