Lost in Time(74)

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.

Charlie walked up, carrying her wrapped present. Within the hour, she would discover that it was a small speaker and microphone that could be tuned to different voice effects. Shortly after unwrapping it, she would overhear her father in the kitchen, opening a beer and handing it to Elliott as he said, “Seriously, dude, what did I ever do to you?” Adeline had loved that little singing machine. Her parents had likely popped champagne the night it broke (as she cried in her room).

But there was to be no crying at the party—or on the way home from school after that—because the teasing about her “homemade hobo clothes” came to an end when Charlie handed her the gift and looked her up and down.

“Adeline, love the dress. Where’d you get it?”

Young Adeline had turned her head to the mean girls as she proudly said, “My mom made it.”

The memory made Adeline laugh, how large that event had seemed back then. Charlie was a football star, a high school heartthrob, and about the hottest thing on the block at the time. They hadn’t been as close as siblings, more like cousins, and Adeline had never been more thankful than that moment.

The memory also brought a stab of remorse for what was going to happen to him.

*

Back in Santa Barbara, Adeline began the next phase of building the future. That began with San Andreas Capital.

She registered the domain name sanandreas.cc (she figured using the cc domain extension emphasized the firm’s tagline: compassionate capital).

She put the word out that she was looking to make investments in early-stage private companies, but she didn’t wait for pitches to arrive over the transom. She went after the companies she knew San Andreas had invested in. She also avoided start-ups that were too high profile, even though she knew they would succeed. She still needed to stay under the radar.

Her first meeting was with a Korean biotech company called Syntran. The CEO was perhaps ten years older than Adeline. Her name was Hana Kim, and she had been born in Korea, educated in the US, and returned to her native land to earn an MD, PhD, and start a company with a lot of promise—and a huge need for capital.

The woman sat in the conference room of the small office in Santa Barbara, a slide with statistics displayed on the projection screen behind her.