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According to Mom, denouement was French for unknotting and referred to the events following the final climax of the plot, when everything was neatly tied up, or as neatly as could be done without exceeding the patience of the reader.

Thanks to the Ed Harkenbach from Mother's timeline, who loved her as he might his own child and worked so hard to reunite her with her husband and daughter, their denouement was flat-out amazing. It was really and truly humongously more satisfying than Amity would have believed it could possibly be when she was being swung around the kitchen by the maniac Falkirk.

They couldn't go back to the bungalow in Amity's and Daddy's world, because even though Falkirk was dead there, a lot of other equally vicious creeps would be looking for them. They couldn't go back to the bungalow in Mother's world, because Amity and her father were dead in that timeline, and even in this crazy multiverse, the dead did not come back to life.

Ed had found an ideal timeline where neither Daddy nor Mother nor Amity had been born, so there were no other versions of themselves to run into while shopping for groceries.

When working on Everett Highways in his native timeline, Ed had realized that corrupt politicians and bureaucrats were siphoning off several billion dollars from the seventy-six billion in project funding. Surprise, surprise. Unlike the version of Ed who befriended Daddy, this Ed had enough street smarts—and a sense of an impending poopstorm—to line his own pockets with a hundred million, most of which he converted into gold bars, before blowing up the project and destroying all the keys to everything except his own.

Four months earlier, after finding a timeline that was perfect for Michelle, he ported again and again, conveying the gold to that parallel world, converting it into the local currency, establishing himself as an upstanding citizen.

Fabricating a life story and getting ID might have been a butt-busting job, but Edwin was assisted in this new world by yet another version of himself, Edgar Harkenbach. As you might expect, Edgar was a brilliant physicist and highly respected. However, he had been wise enough to realize that, although he could find a way to travel to parallel worlds, doing so would cause endless problems. He restrained himself. Sympathizing with Edwin's predicament and all, Edgar proclaimed him a long-lost twin who had been sent home from the hospital with the wrong family, the way heirs to the throne in stories sometimes wind up being raised by peasants while the real peasant baby becomes king. With a lot of sly and shifty maneuvering and not a little outright hugger-muggery, they not only established Edwin in a new life, but gave him a daughter named Michelle and fabricated a background and ID for her husband and daughter. All this scheming and subterfuge had been completed before Edwin visited Michelle in her world for dinner on the evening of April twelfth, when he told her about the multiverse and convinced her that elsewhere Jeffy and Amity were alive and waiting for her.

So on that severe-clear day with the bluest sky that anyone could remember, the reunited Coltrane family and Charlie Pellafino ported from his house, where four men lay dead and the kitchen was a disgusting mess, and arrived in another timeline where a life had been prepared for everyone except Duke. More shifty maneuvering and hugger-muggery ensued, and an identity was provided for the big guy as well. Within a week, Frank and Imogene, Daddy's parents, were likewise relocated.

They all lived in a compound of five lovely houses purchased by Edwin, on a hill overlooking the sea, in a Suavidad Beach that was even prettier and cleaner than the one in which Jeffy and Amity had lived before they ever heard about the multiverse. Snowball was with them, too, because Edwin, being somewhat of a showboater, ported back to the bungalow on Shadow Canyon Lane and extracted the mouse in the dead of night, right under the noses of the shadow state agents still infesting the place.

The first Edwin they ever met, the one who gave Jeffy the key to everything and told him eventually to seal it in a barrel of concrete and sink it in the sea, who had then disappeared forever, had said that his Project Everett Highways had visited 187 parallel worlds. The second Edwin, who had made it his mission to reunite Michelle with her lost family, had checked out 268 worlds, searching for the one in which she might be happiest. He was a different kind of Harkenbach, really and truly.

On the first anniversary of their move to a happier world, the extended family celebrated with an elaborate dinner on the patio at the Coltrane residence. Below them, the storied hills of the town glimmered with magical light, and the starlit sea waited for the moon to rise and play upon its waters. Over the patio were strung Japanese paper lanterns and strings of colored bulbs, and the table was a field of candles in amber-glass cups. The servant robots were efficient, cute, friendly, but not self-aware because artificial intelligence had been outlawed here.

At one point in the festivities, Mother kissed Edwin on his bald head and declared, "You did good, Dad." She could call him Dad because he had adopted her and, of course, he had been as good to her as her late father had been. His head was still as smooth as an egg because he shaved it every day to avoid confusion about who was Edwin and who was Edgar.

He had for darn sure done good, finding them this world. There were, like, so many instances when history here branched away from history on the world where Amity actually had been born that she would have needed a hundred pages to stuff it all in a denouement. Some of the most important were that no one here ever took the work of Karl Marx or Friedrich Nietzsche or Sigmund Freud seriously. So there had been no Lenin, no Soviet Union, no communism or fascism; and two hundred million people who, elsewhere, had been killed by those regimes, had not been killed here. No one had ever heard of Hitler or Stalin or Mao. World War II was never fought, nor the Korean War nor any of the wars thereafter. In a world of lasting peace, much more money had been available for research into other than weapons systems, so that medicine and technology were greatly advanced over what Amity had known in her native timeline. In the US, equality between all races had been achieved in 1942.

Daddy was especially pleased that, without the interruption of World War II, the Art Deco period remained at a peak into the late 1950s, and from it had grown new schools of art and architecture so exciting that the soulless buildings of the Bauhaus movement and all that emanated from it were never inflicted on the world.

Although her father continued to collect Bakelite radios, he didn't find the restoration of them fulfilling enough to make that his life's work. Not after their little adventure. He began writing a fantasy novel.

As the years passed, Jeffrey Coltrane became a well-known name on bestseller lists. Although Michelle Jamison Coltrane chose not to become a performer, she achieved considerable renown as a songwriter in this world that was more disposed to her musical style than had been her native timeline. Duke had no further interest in hotel security; however, his experience investigating gang activities and homicides prepared him to be a tough but fair agent for Jeffrey's books and Michelle's songs, which he often played on his piano.

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.