She had run a dry cleaner in the same strip mall for nineteen years and had never missed a payment on anything. The first letter congratulated her on a Kia she had not bought. The second thanked her for opening a line of credit in Arizona. On the phone with the fraud department she was asked to confirm her mother's maiden name, and she got it wrong twice.

By March the man using her name had better credit than she did. He paid things early. Somewhere in Tempe a version of her was being approved on the spot for a convertible, while she sat at the kitchen table with a cold teabag and forty pages of statements, holding for a supervisor, reading her own social security number to a stranger for the ninth time that week.