Kitty Hammer Bolitar.

Esperanza came in and sat next to him without a word. Some would assume that Myron would want to be alone. Esperanza knew better. She looked at the screen.

“Our first client,” she said.

“Yep,” Myron said. “Did you see her at the club last night?”

“Nope. I heard you call her name, but by the time I turned, she was gone.”

Myron checked the wall posts. Sparse. Some people playing Mafia Wars or Farmville or quizzes. Myron saw that Kitty had forty-three friends. “First thing,” he said. “Let’s print out a list of her friends, see if there is anybody we know.”

“Okay.”

Myron hit a photo album icon called “Brad and Kitty—A Love Story.” Then he started looking through the photographs, Esperanza at his side. For a long time, neither spoke. Myron just clicked, looked, clicked. A life. That was what he was seeing. He had made fun of these social networks and didn’t get them and thought of all the strange, even quasi-perverse stuff about the whole thing, but what he was seeing here, what he was watching go by, click by click, was nothing less than a life, or in this case, two.

His brother’s and Kitty’s.

Myron watched Brad and Kitty age. There were photographs on a sand dune in Namibia, canyoning in Catalonia, sightseeing on Easter Island, helping the natives in Cusco, cliff-diving in Italy, backpacking in Tasmania, doing an archeological dig in Tibet. In some photographs, like the ones with the hilltop villagers in Myanmar, Kitty and Brad sported native garb. In others they wore cargo shorts and tees. Backpacks were almost always present. Brad and Kitty often posed cheek to cheek, one smile almost touching the other. Brad’s hair remained a constant curly dark mess, at times getting long and unruly enough to mistake for a Rastafarian’s. He hadn’t changed much, his brother. Myron studied his brother’s nose and saw that it was a little more crooked now—or maybe that was projecting.

Kitty had lost weight. There was something both wiry and brittle about her physique now. Myron kept clicking. The truth was—a truth he should be happy about—Brad and Kitty glowed in every shot.

As if reading his mind Esperanza said, “They look damn happy.”

“Yep.”

“But they’re vacation pictures. You can’t tell anything from them.”

“Not vacation,” Myron said. “This is their life.”

Christmas was in Sierra Leone. There was a Thanksgiving in Sitka, Alaska. Another festival of some kind in Laos. Kitty listed her current address as “Planet Earth’s Obscure Corners,” and her occupation as “Former Miserable Tennis Wunderkind Now Happy Nomad Looking to Better the World.” Esperanza pointed at her “occupation” and made a gagging gesture with her finger and mouth.

When they finished looking through that first album, he went back to the photo page. Two more albums were there—one called “My Family,” the other labeled “The Best Thing in Our Lives—Our Son, Mickey.”

Esperanza said, “You okay?”

“Fine.”

“Then let’s get to it.”