“I need some help here!” Hunter called after the stretcher-bearers. “She’s—”

“No,” Polly said. “You need to leave me here and go fetch a crowbar.” But he was already on one knee beside her, pulling on her ankle.

“The heel’s caught,” he said. “Can you pull your foot out of the shoe?”

No, she thought, twisting around to look at the stretcher. The rescue crew nearly had it to the opening. The explosion would come any moment. Hunter wouldn’t have time to make it out, even if he left her now.

“I’m so sorry,” she said.

And he must have thought she was talking about the shoe because he said, “No matter. We’ll just have to get you out, shoe and all.” He reached his hand down through the ragged-edged plaster and fumbled with her foot. “I told you you’d get into trouble clambering about an incident in high heels, though all in all, it’s a very good thing you did.”

No, it isn’t, she thought bitterly. I got you all killed. She turned to take one last look at Sir Godfrey and the men carrying the stretcher, but they weren’t there.

“Where?” she said, and heard voices shouting, doors slamming, a motor starting up.

The ambulance, she thought. They’re transporting him to hospital.

The ambulance roared off, bells ringing. Which meant Sir Godfrey was still alive. And the rescue crew was still alive. The theater hadn’t gone up.

“They made it out,” she murmured, unable to take it in.

Hunter looked up briefly from struggling with her foot. “Good. He should be right as rain once they get him to hospital and get him stitched up. You should be proud. You saved his life.”

Like Mike saved Hardy’s life, she thought. And Eileen kept Alf and Binnie from going on the City of Benares.

“It was clever, you stopping up that hole with your clothes,” Hunter was saying. “If you hadn’t found him and known what to do, he’d have been for it.”

It’s true, she thought. If she hadn’t caught her heel and bent down to free it, she’d never have heard him calling. And if she hadn’t been wearing these shoes, her heel wouldn’t have caught.

“For want of a shoe,” she murmured, and had a sudden vision of Mike saying, “If I hadn’t come through when I did, I wouldn’t have missed the bus and been stuck in Saltram-on-Sea, I wouldn’t have fallen asleep on the Commander’s boat …”

And if I hadn’t gone to the Works Board to volunteer to be an ambulance driver, I wouldn’t have been assigned to ENSA, I wouldn’t have been performing at the Alhambra …

“Try to move your foot back and forth,” Hunter said. “That’s it.” He reached his arm down deeper. “Keep moving it. I’ve nearly got it free.”

She nodded absently, thinking, If Mrs. Sentry hadn’t seen me in A Christmas Carol, she wouldn’t have assigned me to ENSA.

But why, if the continuum was trying to repair itself, hadn’t it kept her from being here the way it had kept Mike from getting to Dover, the way it had kept her and Eileen and Mike from reaching Mr. Bartholomew the night of the twenty-ninth?