“Would you like a name on it?”
“Yes. I’d like my own name on it.”
The woman looked up, surprised.
“It’s my birthday today.”
“All right. What’s your name, dear?”
“Daniele. You spell it with one N and one L.”
FIFTY
In the fall of 2008, Adeline moved to Santa Barbara. Her mother was taking maternity leave from teaching that semester, and she felt that it was best to leave the Bay Area. There was too much risk of running into her father or being photographed.
And besides, she knew from living with Daniele that San Andreas Capital had been based in Santa Barbara initially.
For a while, she lived the life of a loner. She learned all she could about quantum physics. She planned the events she knew had to happen. In the winter evenings, she read by the fire. When the weather allowed, she took long walks, listening to audiobooks and learning foreign languages, including German, Korean, and Chinese.
She kept in touch with her mother, who gave her updates on the infant that was now the center of her and her husband’s lives.
In March of 2009, as the stock market was reaching the nadir of the bear market brought on by the financial crisis, her mother remarked on a lengthy call that “Sam wants to sell all of our stocks. He’s convinced the bottom is going to fall out of everything. He wants to use the money to buy a bigger house. They’re practically giving them away right now compared to prices a few years ago.”
Adeline glanced at a real-time quote of the S&P 500 on the monitor on her desk. The index was trading around 700. It had lost about half of its value from its recent peak. It didn’t have much more to lose, but Adeline couldn’t tell her mother that. And it answered some of how her parents would find themselves in such bad financial shape before Sam joined Absolom.
The correct answer to her mother’s question was to stay the course and stay invested in low-cost index funds and high-quality companies with long-term growth potential. Instead, Adeline said, “I don’t know. I’m not much of an investor.”
Much as she wanted to, she couldn’t change the past.
Her job was to ensure everything happened as it had.
*
If Adeline could use one word to describe her life in Santa Barbara, it would have been “quiet.” She lived on a quiet street, in a small, quiet-looking house, and she herself was quiet （most of the time）。 She exercised, and she studied, and she went to art galleries and a few bookstore readings for her favorite authors—and not much else.
She was preparing for the future. She was also dreading it.
In the summer of 2014, she drove her new Toyota Camry for two hours down to Beverly Hills, to the office of a plastic surgeon whose work no one knew about but everyone saw on TV almost daily.
He sat on a round rolling stool, wearing a white coat, his hands pressed together as if he was about to pray.
“Tell me, Daniele: what would you like to change about your appearance?”
“My face.”
“And why is that?”
“It’s not quite right for my future.”
*
After recuperating from the cosmetic surgery, Adeline drove up to Stanford for the first time since leaving.
It was her birthday, and she wanted to ride by her old house.
The streets were quiet in the Crescent Park neighborhood of Palo Alto, where her family lived. Her parents had bought the modest home shortly after she had arrived in the world. Adeline now knew they had used the money from stock sales to make a down payment. The timing was wrong on the stock dispositions, but the house was a good investment.
In front of the Spanish Revival home were letters in the yard that read HAPPY 6th BIRTHDAY.
People were streaming into the backyard, carrying presents and smiling. Adeline recognized the group entering through the wooden gate. It was Elliott, his wife, and their only child, a son named Charlie, who had just turned fourteen that summer. He was wearing a high school letter jacket and stood two inches taller than his father.
Adeline didn’t dare go in. But she vividly remembered one scene from the party, the one that was about to occur. Beyond that gate, her younger self was standing with two of her new friends from kindergarten. She was wearing a floral dress her mother had made for her.
Approaching were three girls that lived nearby who also went to Adeline’s school. For the past two weeks, the group of girls had heckled her mercilessly about her, in their words, “homemade hobo clothes.” Looking back now, Adeline figured it was simply the stress of starting school that made the girls lash out. Adeline had been an easy target. Her clothes looked different. So they picked on her. But that ended on her birthday.