Sixty-seven times, Anders Rowe has watched hell take the world. Sixty-seven times, he has failed to stop it.He knows how it ends the way an actor knows a script he can no longer bear to perform - every cue, every death, every door that opens only one way. The ending is set. He has lived all the way to it, again and again, and nothing he has ever changed has changed the last page.This time, he believes he has done what he never could before. He has written an alternate. And it rests, without their knowing, on his four children - Ben, who holds the family together with his bare hands; Elle, building a home and a child of her own; Lucas, who cannot stop pulling a thread that was never meant to come loose; and Sophie, who feels the wrongness in the air before anyone will name it.He could warn them. He knows what a warning costs - so he gives them the only direction his draft allows: trust yourself.But an alternate has to be authored, and an author decides what his characters are for. To bend the ending, Anders must arrange the people he loves like lines on a page - and underneath the writing is a question he will not let himself finish: whether the man rewriting the script has become something worse than the horror that ends the world.The script has one ending. To spare his children from it, Anders may have to become the thing they need saving from.