Amity became twelve, thirteen, fourteen, fifteen, under the loving tutelage of her parents. She also had three grandparents—Frank, Imogene, and Edwin—plus one official uncle, Edgar, and one unofficial uncle, Duke. She blossomed and grew wiser; she knew it and thrived on the blessings of the day.

Even in this best of all possible worlds, there were sad times, as when Snowball died, and happy times, like when they got their first golden retriever puppy, Cuddles, but for the longest while, there were no terrible times.

Nevertheless, worlds existed where John Falkirk still lived and sought the key to everything. Evil never dies. It just closes one franchise and opens another elsewhere.

Edwin kept his key to everything as well as the one that had been given to Jeffy and that had, for a short while, been in the possession of Falkirk. The peace of this timeline quickly mellowed him, and he decided against tracking down and killing sicko versions of himself and Falkirk on other worlds. However, he did not destroy the keys or sink them in the sea, for that would leave the family without options if one day another Falkirk ported here with some nefarious purpose.

On the morning of her sixteenth birthday, Amity rose before first light, showered, and dressed. As dawn broke, she took Cuddles for a walk on leash, down through the picturesque streets, through the park, to the shore. A special luncheon was planned and, in the evening, a party, but first she would celebrate with the dog, who loved the sea as if he’d been a sailor in a previous incarnation. Sweet sixteen. She knew that she would remember this day forever, and she wanted Cuddles also to have good memories of it, for she loved him no less than he loved her.

Life was an infinite library of stories, and in every story, a girl such as Amity learned an important lesson, sometimes more than one, whether she was a highborn child of royalty or a milkmaid. She was in fact neither. Her parents were artists, and she found cows too smelly. But she had learned some things, anyway. The biggest lesson that she had learned was this:

Your life in the multiverse was like a magnificent oak tree with a gajillion branches, some of them deformed and some of them beautiful. You made stupid decisions, and tragedy ensued. You made wise decisions, and tragedy ensued. But for every tragedy, there was a triumph, a world where you lived instead of dying, where you found love instead of losing it, where you prospered. Both fate and free will were involved. Everything that could happen to you was known from the big bang, and yet each version of Amity chose the path she wished to choose. In the end, the meaning of your life was the final shape and beauty—or ugliness—of the tree when all branches had grown to maturity. This was a total crazy-ass way to design the multiverse, really and truly. If before her adventure someone had explained this reality to her, she would have called it bullsugar. However, she had experienced the truth of it, and with the passing days, she had come to see great beauty in this infinite forest of oak trees that were human lives in their striving, such beauty that sometimes the contemplation of it left her breathless and humbled.

Pets were allowed on a section of the beach. She took off her sneakers and rolled up the legs of her jeans and freed Cuddles from his leash.

The glorious golden retriever raced across the compacted sand, splashed into the foaming surf, and swam out as if he knew of Japan and meant to get there.

She wasn’t worried about him. He never went too far because he couldn’t bear to be a great distance from her.

She waded into the waves, which broke around her calves, and she stood watching Cuddles challenge the low swells.

This creation, the multiverse, was a construct of uncountable second chances, and although it permitted evil and death, it also permitted good and life, and made endless allowances for each person, which meant that at the heart of the mechanism was infinite mercy.

Here, now, the warm morning and clear sky and the spangled sea and the joyful dog and the wonder of existence made her heart race and her eyes shine as if all the light of the world came from within her.