When she was six, she had decided it said FUNNY with the beginning missing. When she was nine, she had made up an entire story about a man named Lynn who was a sea captain. When she was twelve she had stared at it for a whole afternoon with a magnifying glass from her father's desk drawer, trying to make out the letters that had been cut away, and had cried, and had not told anyone why. When she was fourteen she had put the book in the bin and the bin on the shelf.
She was not aware of putting down the scanner. She was aware that her hand was on the counter, near the wallet, not touching it, and that her fingers were shaking in a small fast way that she had never seen her fingers do before, like the wings of something.
"That's," she said.
The man was watching her now. Something had changed in his face, some wariness, the look of a dog that has been kicked enough times to know the shape of a raised foot.
She had to say it twice, because the first time it did not come out with any sound at all.
"That's… me," she whispered.
For a long moment the man did not move at all. Behind him, a woman with a cart full of paper towels was reading the tabloids in the rack by the gum and had not noticed anything, and over the store speakers a voice was telling everyone that rotisserie chickens were now available in the deli, hot and ready, and the plastic ring in Shay's cupcake had a tiny pink jewel on it that caught the light.
Then he closed the wallet. He did it gently, the way a man closes a book in a library.
"No," he said. "I'm sorry. No, honey. That's not right."
"It is."
"Her name was Daphne." He said it carefully, as if each word were a step on ice. "Daphne Lynn. You're..." He looked at the tag again. "That's a pretty name, Cassia. But that's not her."
"Cassia Daphne Renfro." Her voice sounded strange to her, thin and far away, as if someone else were speaking it from the next aisle. "They moved it to the middle. My parents. When they adopted me. The caseworker said it would be better, because of..." She stopped. She did not actually know because of what. She had been told, once, at nine or ten, that there had been a reason, a safety reason, and she had accepted that the way she accepted that the sky was blue and that she was allergic to cats. "There's a book," she said. "With pictures in it. That one's in it. But it's cut. You're cut out of it. There's only your arm. Your arm and the bird's tail and the end of the name. Y, N, N."