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Jeffy ricocheted from the Suavidad Beach where Amity was long dead, back to the town in which she was still alive, where she had better be alive, because the alternative wasn't something that he could handle. He didn't care that there were many parallel worlds in which his daughter remained breathing and vital even if she proved to be dead here, because this was the girl he'd loved for more than eleven years. He could love other versions of her—How could he not?—but in the thousands of days of their shared lives, he and this Amity laughed at the same things, sorrowed at the same things, weathered precisely the same vicissitudes of life, and no other Amity could be exactly like the one who'd filled his heart for more than a decade. She was the best thing that ever happened to him. Another Amity, no matter how nearly identical she might be to the one he raised, would not be his Amity. The loss of her would be real and devastating. Having failed her, he would dwell in despair all the remaining days of his life, this one life of many, this only life that mattered to him.

When he and Ed arrived in the master bedroom of the Pellafino house, the air was clean, as if the place hadn't been attacked with gas. He half wondered if the key screwed up and delivered them to the wrong timeline. The silence was a relief from the ear-skewering squeal of the alarm in the other world, but such quiet was also a worry because from it he inevitably inferred that Falkirk's work here was already concluded, with no one left to rescue.

Ed whispered, "Shotgun."

As Jeffy handed over the weapon, men laughed somewhere on the second floor, and another man, much closer, called out, "Canker, Yessman—here, now!"