Chapter Ten
Ten
Sam’s priority wasn’t to have a new, cool-sounding name. She truly didn’t care for any of that. Her priority was to make the process of finding her as difficult as possible to anyone who ever tried to, if anyone ever did.
So, with that in mind, a day after Samantha Chambers was granted the right to a new identity, she picked the name combination that would return the largest number of results through a name search – Mary Smith.
‘It actually doesn’t sound that bad,’ she said to her reflection in the mirror, after repeating the name out loud a handful of times.
The next field on the identity change form was ‘Date of Birth’, and she once again took Oakfield’s advice – different day, different month, different year.
It felt good to be twenty-six again.
As for the date, Mary Smith could think of no better date than October thirtieth, because what that meant was that every year, from then on, she would be celebrating her birthday a day before Halloween – by far her favorite holiday season.
With her new name and date of birth finally chosen, all that Mary needed to do to complete the identity change form was to enter her parents’ names and the city in which Mary Smith had been born.
For her father’s name, she simply decided to follow the same rule that she’d used to create her own.
After another quick Internet search, she discovered that the three most common male first names in the USA were: James, Robert and John.
This time, Sam decided to go with the second most popular male first name in America, Robert, and the main reason for that was because since she would soon become Mary Smith, her father would then be Robert Smith, which was also the name of the lead singer in one of her favorite bands – The Cure.
For her mother, she picked a completely different name – Heather.
She did think about going with either Patricia or Jennifer – second and third most popular female names in the US – but having a whole family made out of the three most common names in America would be a bit much.
Heather was also the name of her real mother’s best friend, which made Sam believe that it was a suitable choice.
Now, Sam had only one decision left to make to complete the identity change process – Mary Smith’s original birthplace.
Here, Sam wanted to go with a very large city – Los Angeles, Chicago, Washington DC, New York City, etc.
She blew hot and cold over a few of them for a while, but in the end she chose New York City, and the thinking behind that decision was based on one simple thing: Sam knew for a fact that the smaller the place, the more people tended to show interest in their local communities, and what that ultimately translated into was “nosy neighbors”.
People knew more about each other’s lives in smaller towns than in bigger cities, and they were usually happy to answer questions if anyone came asking.
The Big Apple, on the other hand, was famous for many things, and one of them was the fact that people were usually too busy with their own lives and problems to nose into anybody else’s business.
New Yorkers had a reputation for keeping themselves to themselves, many not even knowing the name of their next-door neighbor after living in the same neighborhood for years.
And that was it. It had really been that simple.
With the identity change petition already approved and signed off by Judge Reeves, all that Mary’s lawyers had to do was hand in all the documentation that the courts had asked for, which Kristin did on the very same day that she received the form with Sam’s choices – a form that had been delivered to her in a sealed envelope, so that not even Kristin knew what Sam’s new identity would be.
A short week after that, a whole new batch of documents – also in a sealed envelope – was delivered to Kristin Miller’s office.
So, on a warm and sunny afternoon in late May, a battered and broken Samantha Chambers was no more. In her place, a shy, but very happy Mary Smith, stepped out of Kristin Miller’s law office, slid her Carrera sunglasses back on, jumped into her rented car, and simply disappeared into the world.