“We need to find the women in the picture,” he finally said. I told him that I recognized one, that her name was Peri, Thelma Kay on Instagram. “Which one is she?” he asked solemnly.

“The one holding the other down,” I replied, squeezing my eyes shut.

Later in the day Quinn had knocked on my door. I was still awake, hours and hours after arriving home from the Benningtons’. He said he was looking into Peri, Thelma, whoever she was. He sat on the edge of the bed. “There’s something very wrong here,” he said gently, almost soothingly. “There is no way in hell the NYPD missed this. There’s especially no way in hell all the media frenzy surrounding the case missed this.” He paused, running his hand along my comforter. “The photo was just tucked into a book, you say?” I nodded and he sighed, sinking his fingers deeper into my bedding.

“SNAPea is hiding some dark shit if this photo is in the chairman of the board’s bedroom. Some dark shit on Tom, too. Maybe this is why the media sicced everything on you, because someone was paid off.” He wove a hand through his hair. “I’m going to try to find Peri, see if she’ll talk. Then we can get this dead motherfucker and his entire cohort. I promise you that, Vera.” His eyes blazing, a fervor in them I’d rarely seen in our entire friendship, like he’d found a purpose, a mission.

I continue to focus on my collages, putting all my mind matter into them, and as I’m leafing past an article about Instagram updates in one of my back copies of US Weekly, it hits me. I can use my old self. I can put my old self in all these little collages, in the corners, hidden somewhere, big or small. That’s the missing ingredient that would bring these works to the next level.

The problem is that I don’t have any photos of myself anymore. When I changed my number, I chose not to have access to my old Cloud. The best shot of getting personal photos, photos of me that weren’t printed in any news outlets, is to redownload Instagram, find all those selfies and photos Huda forced me to post on my grid, in my Story archives.

Of course, that means opening the sluice gates on an entirely new flood of hate messages. But maybe people have forgotten. Maybe if I just lurk on the app and don’t post anything new, no one will even notice that I’m on there. I can just collect the photos I need and disable my account again. It shouldn’t take more than a few hours.

So I do it and suddenly find myself scrolling through a life that seems to belong to another woman altogether, like I’m cyberstalking a stranger who just happens to look like me.