“I’m sure. So Sam will be gone all summer?”
“He will.”
Adeline knew that her mother would die in approximately twelve years. She also knew she would have to leave her life at some point before she began to look like the girl she grew up to be—for her mother’s sake, and especially her father’s sake.
In fact, to be on the safe side, Adeline had decided not to come into contact with her father until she completed the other change she knew she had to make to be Daniele: cosmetic surgery.
She knew that her younger self would not meet Daniele Danneros until she was eleven—when Daniele was thirty years old. But it wasn’t just the age difference that separated their appearances. She now knew that Daniele had slightly altered her face to ensure that no one recognized her. Adeline would have to go in for surgery at some point. She probably should’ve done it upon arriving in the past, but she didn’t know then what she knew now. Such was the time traveler’s burden.
Adeline returned her focus to the present and her mother’s request. “Well, I’d be happy to help.”
“Thank you. We’ll be busy. I’m teaching summer school—I agreed to do it before I knew I was pregnant—and there’s still a lot to do around the house.”
“We’ll get it done.”
“Sam has promised to be back by the due date—September seventeenth. The LHC is slated to start up on September tenth, so that should be plenty of time.”
Adeline simply smiled. She knew that the LHC would indeed start up on September 10. And her birthday was September 8.
She marveled that history was funny that way: what your parents tell you about the past is sometimes a heavily edited version. And there was still room for surprises.
FORTY-NINE
That summer, Adeline and her mother were virtually inseparable.
They painted the nursery, shopped for baby clothes at Goodwill, and stayed up late into the night assembling the crib.
“Really, you can go home,” her mother said. “Once I start something, I get a little obsessed with finishing it.”
Adeline knew the feeling. And now she knew where she had gotten it from. “I’m not going anywhere.”
The floor was covered in pieces, as if a wooden treehouse had exploded in the room. The direction book lay flayed open, and her mother was following every step to the letter.
“Confession,” her mother said. “I waited until Sam left to do this.” She tilted her head. “I love him to death, but he’s not very handy around the house.”
Adeline laughed.
“He’d probably starve to death if left alone in the woods.”
The smile faded from Adeline’s face. “You never know. People are capable of a lot more than we might think—when life requires.”
As Adeline said the words, she knew they were half for her own sake. Since she had seen him disappear in the Absolom machine, not a day had gone by when Adeline didn’t think of her father and wonder how things had turned out for him in the Triassic.
Most of all, she dreaded the event she knew would come in nineteen years: she would have to stand in that room all over again and watch him slip into the past.
The events she was certain of, however, concerned her the least. Her focus now was the secrets in the past. The details that might help her save her father. Because she was going to get that chance. And she had nineteen years to prepare for it—assuming she could control the past. If things didn’t happen as they had, there would be no future to save.
*
In June and July, the financial world slipped into chaos.
Federal regulators seized IndyMac Bank, making it one of the largest bank failures in US history.
The Fed extended credit lines to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and later took them over in September, around the time Lehman Brothers failed and the Troubled Asset Relief Program was announced.
Adeline rolled some of the proceeds from her credit default swaps into tech stocks with strong growth potential.
Closer to home, life assumed a routine. By day, Adeline helped her mother with summer school. In the afternoons and evenings, they worked on preparing the small bungalow in Menlo Park for the arrival of Sam and Sarah Anderson’s first child. A child who, in a strange twist of fate, had returned home after nineteen years.
One afternoon, while grading papers in her office on campus, her mother said, “Are you going back to school in the fall?”
“No.”
“Any particular reason?”
“I think the education I need is out in the world, not inside a classroom.” Adeline looked up from the pages. “No offense.”