She watched him carefully for a few days. His grief seemed normal. Restrained sorrow, a feeling of abandonment, confusion when he didn’t find his wife in the rooms where she was usually to be found doing chores; his senses hadn’t yet assimilated the change. She was sure that he wasn’t responsible for that misdeed.

Apep Otein had no friends. The home page contained only the photo of Pepa Nieto and a blank wall. Perhaps, she thought, she was the only person who had received a friend request. She didn’t accept it, but she didn’t block it either. The itch to find out who was behind this macabre initiative and the authority of her mother’s image, her name written backward, won out over common sense.

She’d restricted access to her account since the girlfriend of a former lover had started trolling her. During the months before she discovered the identity of the troll—who presented herself as a man on social media—she developed a phobia of being attacked in the street. When someone told her that the person posting was mentally ill she laughed at herself and her fears. Particularly her fears.

Finding herself using the word “trolling” again was a shock, as if it were a self-fulfilling prophecy. She’d been overly hasty in deciding that fear could be disdained, and was now afraid that there were higher powers ready to punish that lack of caution.

She waited for the message that would confirm that Apep Otein’s profile masked some warped person who had the means to enter her house and search through the albums until the photo was found.

And it wasn’t just any old photo, but her favorite among the hundreds of images of Pepa Nieto. When she was a child, she’d spent hours gazing adoringly at that snapshot, as if everything that was her mother had been present on that day in 1975, before her daughter’s birth. The outcome of those whole evenings of mesmerized gazing was foreseeing a future in which, by force of having looked so carefully at the photo, she could resemble her mother at twenty-seven, could possess the same features, the same sweetness of her beauty, so far removed from her own (she’d inherited her father’s plump ungainliness). Until she was in fifth grade her only wish was to be the woman in that portrait.

Puberty broke the spell and her enchantment metamorphosed into resentment. Her desire not to see herself in the maternal mirror dominated all else. During the last months of Pepa’s illness she requested a sabbatical to do research at a foreign university. That innocent activity sheltered her from the organ failure, the oxygen tanks, her mother’s brutally fleshless body.

The feared message studded with threats never arrived. Apep Otein still had no friends and the wall was empty. It was as if the account had no other purpose beyond its mere existence.