Page 48 of Caging Darling

“John?” I ask.

“You wanted to see Astor,” he says. “It made it easier for him to slip through.”

The implications of that sentence crack a few ribs.

“John, I don’t understand. You were always the strongest of the both of us. Why did you do it? Why did you leave…” I hesitate to say me and Michael. There’s something about leaving Michael that seems more of a transgression than leaving me. “I just didn’t know you hurt that badly, that’s all.”

Tink shifts beside me, and John’s wraith glances at her. He clears his throat. “I was made in that cave over there.”

I trace his gaze, finding the cave where I once hid Astor from Peter, where I once drugged my true Mate.

Had I known then, deep down, what he was? Had I known then that I wanted nothing more than to keep him? That drugging my Mate was the only way to keep him in my vicinity?

“Why there?” I ask, because I can’t think of a reason anything in that cave could hurt John, unless…

The memory of Astor’s wraith pops into my head. I’ve never considered what he does when he’s not following me around, but I know from stories about wraiths and from my own encounters with Simon’s wraith that they often act out the painful memories that birthed them.

It had been in that cave that I told Astor what happened to me in my parents’ parlor.

Shame, cold and clammy, washes over me.

I know, I know deep down that nothing that happened in that parlor was my fault, but there’s something about my brother knowing what happened to me, how I was touched, that makes my skin slick. I race through my memories, trying to remember exactly how I worded it to Astor. Precisely which details Idisclosed. I can’t come up with the exact language I used, and now my mind is replaying every crude gesture and touch that I might have admitted aloud, that my brother might have overheard.

“Wendy,” John’s wraith says. He reaches out to touch my shoulder, but there’s no pressure there when a shadow lands on the fabric of my shirt. “I…I’m afraid I need to apologize to you.”

My face goes hot and cold at the same time. “No, it’s not your fault you overheard,” I say. “I shouldn’t have talked about it so openly.”

Again, Tink shifts. When I glance at her, there’s pity in her eyes, but something else, too. Anger, I think, though I can’t tell who it’s directed toward.

“I’m glad you did,” says John. “In fact, I wish I had talked more openly, myself.”

This time, the anger rolls through me. “Did someone…did someone…”

John’s wraith shakes his head. “No, no one touched me, but I…” He takes a breath, the shadows at his chest expanding. “Wendy, I’m so sorry. I can’t ever apologize enough for my part in this. I… knew what had happened to you. I was outside the parlor one night when a suitor was over. I overheard what happened.”

Fog envelops my ears. John’s voice goes quiet, like I’ve been dunked under water again. John tried to bring this up once before, not long after we’d first arrived in Neverland. He implied he had overheard something, and I had dismissed his concern, claiming he hadn’t heard anything of importance. He dropped the subject eventually, and I’d told myself he’d been convinced. And if he’d been convinced, that meant that what he’d overheard couldn’t have been all that vulgar.

But I know now that I’d only been trying to talk myself out of a truth I could not bear, and I can no longer bring myself to dismiss my brother.

“Wendy.” John says my name with force, but not the commanding sort.

“I’m so sorry you had to hear that,” I say, stomach sick with what that might have done to John’s psyche, who would have been early in adolescence at the time.

“Don’t apologize. Please, whatever you do,” says my brother. Not my brother. “Don’t you see? You were the victim. And I…I was the bystander who didn’t help. I didn’t know until that night in the cave that it happened more than once. I thought it was an isolated event—oh, but that sounds as if I’m making excuses. You have to believe I’m not…I just…I didn’t know how often you endured them. That it was Father and Mother who made you do it… I used to play billiards with Father, you see. He said it was our special time together. I wanted his approval so badly I ached for it. Michael had so much of their attention by that time, and rightly so. And they were so worried about your curse. It’s not that I was jealous, I was just so thirsty for his attention, his praise. I think I knew he was keeping me away from something. Distracting me. I just didn’t want to know.”

It hits me then, like a nail to the gut. That John’s wraith was formed when he overheard my story, not because it brought up trauma from his past, though certainly that must have been part of it, but because he blamed himself.

I stare at the memory of my brother, wishing I could look into his blue eyes, made slightly larger by his glasses, but I can’t. All I can see is emptiness where there should be my brother’s face. And though John, through his wraith, can apologize to me, I can never truly apologize to him.

John died bearing the guilt of what happened to me in the parlor.

John died because…

“That’s why you killed yourself,” I say. “Because…because you thought what happened to me was your fault.” If there was anything in my stomach after coughing everything up after drowning, I would vomit it out now. My belly is writhing, churning. “You took your own life because of me?”

And then I’m falling to my knees, clutching my mouth with my sea-wrinkled palm to stifle the screams, the sobs, whatever it is welling up inside of my throat, stabbing at the inside and begging to be let out.

John’s wraith glances at Tink, like he knows he’s made my pain worse instead of better, but doesn’t know how to fix it. The monster inside my throat scratches its way out, slipping through my closed fingers in the shape of muffled wails. My knees scrape against the sand, my body trembling with regret.

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