Contacts vanished

Hello,

recently I created a new Apple ID for our daughter because she received as a present my wife’s old phone (IPhone XR) . I manually deleted all the contacts from the XR but they vanished from my wife’s phone (IPhone SE2) although on the XR it was the new Apple ID. I tried to recover all the contacts from the Cloud but this operation wasn’t successful because the cloud is full of photos and I did not pay to get more space. Is there any way to recover the contacts from the SE2? If not maybe you could enlighten me and tell me how all this was possible.

Thank you