Adeline smiled and shook her head, remembering those lines Daniele had said in the library: Right now, you don’t care about money because you have it. You’ve never had to wonder how you’ll afford your next meal.
Adeline looked at the stack of cash on the table. It was all the money to her name.
Daniele’s words echoed again. You’re assuming your circumstances will never change. They could. They do for a lot of people—in the blink of an eye. One minute your family is rich. The next, you’re carrying every dollar to your name in your pocket, you have no home, and you don’t know where you’re going to sleep that night.
At the rate she was expending cash—on the hotel room and food—she would be broke shortly. She glanced back to the muted television. The financial education Daniele had imparted had indeed been important.
She navigated to the E*Trade website and began opening an account. She got as far as the page that asked for her social security number. This wasn’t going to work. She would probably run into the same issue if she tried to get a normal job—any background check would likely reveal that the ID was a fake.
Adeline’s gaze drifted back to the ten numbers on the slip of paper on the coffee table.
The solution to her problem was right here.
She was dead tired. She had left her time at night and arrived in the past in mid-morning. She had probably been unconscious for a while after Daniele knocked her out, but she was still exhausted. For the most part, she had been running on adrenaline. But she knew that time was of the essence now. She had to keep pushing forward. The thing she needed would take time to make.
*
She took a cab to East Palo Alto, to the strip mall that housed Shen Photo.
It was a cramped little store, with a booth for passport photos and chairs lined up under the plate glass window and the far wall. Several families were waiting in the store, speaking Spanish and Chinese in hushed tones.
When the proprietor saw Adeline, he narrowed his eyes as if she was in the wrong place.
“Picking up?” he asked. It was the same sharp voice she had heard on the phone.
“No,” she said, looking around, still confused.
He held his hand out. “Drop off?”
Adeline shook her head. “Drop off what?”
The man grimaced, clearly annoyed, and motioned to the bags lying in bins behind him. “Film.”
“I don’t have any film.”
Adeline scanned the people sitting in the folding metal chairs then studied the man behind the counter, who was visibly nervous now.
“Okay,” he said. “You go now.”
*
Adeline did go, but she didn’t go very far. She sat outside a Starbucks in the same strip mall, at a table with a clear view of Shen Photo, watching the patrons come and go, an idea forming in her head.
When she was sure the store was empty, she walked back inside and waited until the man emerged from the back room.
She held out the California driver’s license for Daniele Danneros.
“I need this to be a real ID.”
“No. Wrong place.”
“I need it.”
He shook his head. “Wrong place.”
His eyes drifted from Adeline’s face to the middle of her chest.
She knew what he was thinking. She glanced behind her, through the plate glass window, at the nearly empty parking lot.
She had thrown the ink-stained dress away. She now wore a sundress with flowers on it that she’d bought at Goodwill. She reached down and pulled it up, revealing her pasty skin, panties, and bra. “I’m not wearing a wire. I’m not a cop.”
She let the dress fall back down. “I need help. I need a social. And IDs that will pass a background check.”
The man inhaled and exhaled. Adeline felt her fate hanging in the balance.
“Four thousand.”
She nodded, and he motioned to the picture booth.
FORTY-SEVEN
Adeline slept in the next morning.
Upon waking, she made a list of all the things she remembered from her childhood and all the things Daniele had told her about her past.
For the future to exist, it all had to happen as it had before. That was up to Adeline now.
She wondered then about the nature of fate and the universe. She wondered if there was something even larger at work, if all these tiny slices of reality—these causal events—that stacked on top of each other led to something she couldn’t imagine now.
She wanted to believe they did.
Yesterday she couldn’t have conceived that she would be the person responsible for Absolom, for her father’s exile from this timeline—and possibly Nora’s death.