Jeffy felt as though he were moving through something thicker than air, the day resisting him like a hundred fathoms of water would resist a deep-sea diver making his way across an ocean floor.

The house on Bastoncherry Lane wasn’t stucco like many houses in Suavidad Beach, wasn’t in any genre of Spanish architecture or in the craftsman style, or mid-century modern, or faux Tuscan, or of a soft contemporary design. For a Southern California beach town, the residence appeared unique: a two-story white-clapboard home with forest-green shutters flanking the windows, so traditional that it could have been the home of almost any family in any TV sitcom from the 1950s and ’60s. It was a house where you imagined there was much love and laughter, where the family’s few problems were small and resolved in thirty minutes between station breaks.

The front walk of herringbone-pattern brick led to brick steps and a brick-floored porch added during a remodel, years after the house was built, replacing a concrete walk and stoop. No other brickwork than this could have inspired such intense sentimental memories in Jeffy. In the world from which he’d come—evidently in this world as well—his dad had been the masonry contractor on the job, and Jeffy had worked with him that summer. He’d been sixteen. He had first seen Michelle Jamison while on that project. She was fifteen, and he adored her, although in secret. He was shy, she vivacious. He was enchanted with the world as it had been decades earlier; she cared little for the past, was versed in all the latest music and movies, wrote songs, and had a plan to shape the future to her desires. Nonetheless, in retrospect, he could not justify to himself why he’d taken more than four years to ask her for a date.

With Amity at his side, he climbed the brick steps and went to the front door and hesitated, heart quickening with the prospect of love reborn, and then he rang the bell.

Amity took his hand and squeezed it. “Her name’s still Jamison. She never married.”

“Maybe she didn’t. Maybe she did. We don’t know anything about her life in this world.”

“I look a little like her. If she sees herself in me, maybe she’ll believe our story, believe there’s a better world than this. Then she’ll come with us.”

“Don’t wish so hard,” he advised. “Soft wishes are more likely to come true.”

She let go of his hand and blotted her palms on her jeans.

The door opened, and Michelle Jamison stood before them, as lovely as ever. The seven years since he’d last seen her had taken more of a toll than Jeffy expected: a new leanness in her features that suggested hardship; fans of small lines at the corners of her eyes; and something in the eyes themselves that hadn’t been there before, perhaps a weary resignation.

She frowned at Amity, as if in fact a quality in the girl’s countenance affected her. After that fleeting look of puzzlement, when she turned her attention to Jeffy, she evinced no recognition. “Can I help you?”

For a moment, words failed him. Seven years of yearning, of aching loss and regret were an impediment to speech. He had never forgotten that he loved her, but time had faded his memory of the intensity of that love, which possessed him now as fully as ever before. He wanted to take her in his arms, but he could do no such thing, not in this timeline where they had never made love, never married, never conceived a daughter.

His voice sounded strange to him when he said, “You won’t remember me. I’m Jeffy Coltrane. I worked with my dad and his crew the summer when we laid the brick for your walkways and porch and back patio. I was sixteen then, eighteen years ago.”

Shadows pooled in the room behind her, and from them emerged a pale-faced raven-haired boy of about Amity’s age. “Mother?” Standing at Michelle’s side, he didn’t resemble her at all. His posture and expression suggested a treasured sense of superiority; he regarded their visitors with thin-lipped contempt.

The boy wore brown shoes, khaki pants, and a matching shirt. The breast pocket of the shirt featured the face of a wolf with glaring yellow eyes, and there were epaulets on the shoulders. It appeared to be a uniform.

“Mother, who’re they?”

“This man says he did the masonry here a long time ago. He hasn’t told me why he’s come around.”

“I’m Amity.” A tremor in the girl’s voice revealed turbulent emotion that, to this woman and boy, would sound inappropriate in these circumstances. “I’m Amity,” she repeated, “and all I want to know is—”

“Amity,” Jeffy cautioned.

But she was face-to-face with her mother, or seemed to be, and seven years of pent-up longing propelled her to finish: “—are you happy here, is everything all right here?”

The boy cocked his head. “Is something wrong with you? What’s wrong with you?”

“Rudy, be nice,” his mother said.

Another presence loomed out of the shadows behind Michelle, a stranger of about Jeffy’s age.

Rudy ignored his mother’s admonition and regarded Amity with suspicion. “You’re old enough to join the Wolves. They even take girls now. Why haven’t you joined?”

“What wolves?”

“The Justice Wolves. What other wolves are there? You should’ve joined.”

The man behind Michelle said, “What’s happening?”

“Dennis, this is Mr. Coltrane,” Michelle said. “He tells me that he and his father did all the masonry here when Dad remodeled back in the day.”

“Yeah, I know who he is,” Dennis said. “He’s Frank Coltrane’s son. I know the face.”

With every exchange, a web was being spun that would ensnare Jeffy if he said the wrong thing. He suspected that he shouldn’t stand silent, should explain himself. “I just . . . I wanted Amity to see some of my father’s work. We shouldn’t have disturbed you. I just thought maybe . . .” He didn’t know how to finish the sentence.

“Something’s wrong with them,” Rudy declared.

“You’re like my half brother or something,” Amity told him, perhaps seeking his approval to ensure that of his mother.

Rudy sneered. “Brother? My name’s Starkman. Yours ain’t.”

Dennis Starkman said, “Get inside, Michelle. Rudy, you, too.”

When the woman and boy retreated, Starkman came out of the shadows and onto the threshold, revealing that he was dressed in soft black fatigues and black boots, although not in a knitted cap. He wore a gun belt and carried a pistol on his right hip.

His round face was shaped for warm smiles and expressions of kindness. Even scowling as now, he didn’t appear to be the work of darkness that he really was.

“You listen to me, Coltrane. Your old man got what he deserved. He’s damn lucky he was just sent to Folsom instead of being cut down for good. Can you get your head around that?”

With his real father safe in another America, but with Amity at risk here, Jeffy said, “Yes. You’re right. He’s a stubborn man. He always has been.”

“Frank knew the price he might have to pay for being on the wrong side. Some thought you were in it with him, but most of us gave you the benefit of the doubt.”

“I appreciate that.”

Starkman looked doubtful. “Do you really?”

“I know . . . I know who owns the future.” That didn’t sound right. “I want to be a part of it, the better world you’re making.”

“Now you make me wonder,” Starkman continued, “coming around here. To what purpose? Did you mean to threaten my family?”

“No, no. Not at all. I just did it for the girl. She doesn’t understand why . . . why my dad did what he did, why he fell in with the wrong crowd. I don’t understand any more than she does, but I wanted to show her, you know, how before he went so far off the rails, he did some good things, he was a great craftsman, he—”

Jeffy embarrassed himself with his obsequious tone, though if he had been any less deferential, he might have invited trouble from which there would be no escape. His babble was as tedious as it was servile, so boring that Starkman dismissed him by cutting him off in midsentence. Turning to Amity, he said, “So who are you, young lady? What do you have to do with Frank Coltrane?”

Abruptly Jeffy remembered that the version of himself native to this world lived alone and evidently had no daughter.

The risk they’d taken by lingering in a strange timeline became manifest. This moment was a trap that one wrong word could spring.

Again, his daughter proved quick and convincingly innocent. “Uncle Frank lived in our block. He’s not my uncle, really, but he’s always been, you know, so sweet to me and my dog, Snowball. I know he did a major bad thing and had to be sent away, but I wonder how he could be so nice and so bad at the same time. I guess the nice part must have been like a trick, and that makes me sad.”

Starkman’s eyes remained as dark with suspicion as with pigment. “What did you mean by saying my boy is your half brother?”