fiction - How to handle a character when she is lying about her name

I am in the midst of writing my second NaNo novel, and I have encountered a problem I didn't anticipate. It is similar to this question, about changing a character's name in the middle of a story, but the situation in my story is different enough that I think it will need a different answer.

In the first part of the story, we meet the protagonist, Nicene. After a second part (which isn't written yet), she is discovered unconscious on the streets by Shadow. During this period, the story is from Shadow's point of view and she is 'the woman'. After she regains consciousness, she tells him that her name is Cherry, and so the narrative continues with her named as Cherry. The trouble is, I am sliding back into her point of view, but I haven't let the reader know that this woman is actually Nicene.

I don't really want it to be a surprise to the reader when they find out who she is, so I have made several connections between the prior part and the current part, and Shadow has made it obvious that he doesn't believe that Cherry is her real name. I am on the verge of revealing her honorifics, which are important and should be a surprise, but might also further confuse the reader.

I am stuck on how to transition from the viewpoint of someone who doesn't know her real name ('Cherry') back to her ('Nicene'), because Nicene certainly doesn't think of herself as Cherry—that's just an alter ego—but the reader might not have realized who she really is.

Is there a good way of handling this?

Answer

A few possibilities:

• Tag Nicene with an utterly distinctive physical feature. When Shadow observes that physical feature, readers will know that it is Nicene.


• Give Nicene some tag phrase, and have Cherry use the phrase.


• Write an earlier scene in Nicene's POV, where she introduces herself to someone as Cherry.


• In the scenes from Shadow's POV, introduce a character who knows Cherry as Nicene. Or maybe who vaguely remembers meeting her before, and can't remember her name, but knows it is not Cherry.


• Make it clear that Cherry knows that her name is not really Cherry. That may be enough of a hint to carry the reader across the transition.