Adeline shrugged. “I’m fine. Just a cheap ink pen.”
The woman nodded slowly, taking in Adeline’s drenched form and soaking hair. “Do you need some help?”
“I’m okay. Thanks.”
Adeline marched away, turned onto Hamilton Avenue, and sought refuge under a wide red umbrella outside a café. When she was sure no one was watching, she reached inside her dress, pulled out the plastic cardholder, and removed the Absolom ID.
For a moment, she wasn’t sure what she was seeing. The letters were washing away. But Adeline’s picture remained.
Where the card had said Absolom Sciences at the top, it now read CALIFORNIA DRIVER LICENSE.
At the bottom of the license, the sex, hair, eyes, height, and weight were an exact match for her.
But under the expiration date, her name was wrong. She expected to see:
Anderson
Adeline G.
Instead, she saw the same letters that were in her name. But they were arranged in a different order. When she read them, she began to shake.
Danneros
Daniele P.
FORTY-SIX
Adeline stared at the driver’s license.
Her license.
Daniele’s license.
Her license.
It was the link between the two halves of her life: the half she’d already lived and the half she had yet to live. Both periods took place over the same stretch of nineteen years.
Because she was Daniele.
It was enough to break her mind.
Her stomach broke first.
She scrambled to the flower bed by the café’s door, bent over, and emptied the meal Daniele had served her at home—the last meal she had served herself, the night she had given her the earrings, knowing she would need them, the night she had put her in Absolom and sent her back to do the things she knew had already happened.
Daniele’s words echoed through her mind like a bowling ball through a china shop, shattering her: The past cannot be changed. It must occur as it did.
If that was true, was she destined to kill Nora? Adeline decided then and there that she wouldn’t do it. No matter what secrets were lurking here in the past, she wouldn’t let it change her. She wouldn’t become a killer. Not even if causality required it. The thin stacks of reality and events that needed to occur could break for all she cared. She wasn’t going to become a monster for the sake of the universe. It could all end, because becoming a murderer would end her. If that was being selfish, then she was selfish.
The thought of killing Nora made her retch again.
The café door opened and a man in his mid-twenties leaned out, a disappointed look on his face. Adeline probably looked like a day-drinking college student, maybe one who had bombed a big test, or just been dumped, or just couldn’t handle her liquor.
She wiped her mouth and shrugged. He simply shook his head and slipped back inside.
Adeline ventured back out into the rain, making her way to one of the jewelry shops. If she hadn’t been there before, they probably wouldn’t have allowed her soaking wet form inside, but they knew what she had to sell.
“I found my ID,” she said as she slipped the earrings across the counter. “And I want to know what number is on the stones.”
*
Three hours later, Adeline was dry and sitting in the small living area of her extended stay hotel room. On the coffee table was approximately seven thousand dollars in cash—the balance that remained after buying what she needed: clothes from Goodwill; a MetroPCS prepaid cell phone and a Compaq Presario laptop at Circuit City; and two nights’ stay at the hotel.
There was also a small slip of paper on the table, with ten numbers written on it—the numbers that had been engraved on the earrings.
Adeline sensed that it was the other thing she needed. She punched the numbers into the phone, and a man answered on the second ring. His accent was Asian, and he spoke so fast Adeline could barely understand him.
“Shen Photo.”
“Hello. Do you have something waiting for me?”
“Name?”
Adeline swallowed. “Danneros. Daniele.”
“Spell it.”
As she spelled it, she heard him typing on the keyboard. “No.”
When she hung up, Adeline looked up the store online. There was no website and scarcely any information about it, only an address in East Palo Alto.
She turned on the TV and switched to CNBC.
Financials were hit again today, despite the Fed’s move on Friday to inject two hundred billion dollars of liquidity into markets to help stem the credit collapse. Shares of MF Global plunged sixty percent on the day, and Lehman Brothers’ stock dropped twenty percent on fears that either or both could be the next Bear Stearns. Government-supported housing lenders were also in the crosshairs of sellers as Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac rushed to the exit. Even financial execution stocks were punished, with E*Trade, TradeStation, and Interactive Brokers all dropping.