She weighed some kindlier hypotheses. Perhaps her aunt Loli, who liked to commemorate the dead in rather eccentric ways, was the author of the heresy. Her aunt might in fact possess a copy of the photograph, although that supposition didn’t really hold water, because it wasn’t in Loli’s nature not to tell her what she was doing.

As the months went by she landed on the page less and less often and eventually put the whole matter at the back of her mind. Then she visited it again. It was as solitary as ever. The wall was blank, not a single friend. As cold as her dead mother. She decided to accept the friend request.

She tapped the photo, the face in the profile and on the biography. Then, underneath the picture, she noticed the exact date and time when it had been uploaded: July 7, 2001, at six in the morning—the date and time when Pepa Nieto had died in front of her grandmother and godmother. She herself had been asleep on a couch near the deathbed, and they hadn’t woken her until the nurse had been informed so that the body could be transferred to the morgue.

That night, while her mother was dying—it was a Thursday and her breathing had been extremely irregular since the Monday—she’d stretched out on the couch, completely exhausted, and her godmother had draped a sheet over her. The way the fabric was lovingly tucked around her shoulders felt identical to when her mother had leaned over her bed to pull up the blankets. It was the last time she felt that bird-like delicacy on her body. She’d slept for a while, until her godmother woke her to say that Pepa had passed away. She knew instantly it had been her mother, through her godmother, who had gently covered her with that sheet; she knew that it was a farewell gesture, a final protective act.

She checked Facebook help to see if it was possible to make changes to the date and time of a post. The answer was alarming: that data could not be modified. The following two nights she scarcely slept, and eventually decided to tell her father. He was lounging in front of the television, and just shrugged his shoulders, as if it were perfectly normal for someone to open an account at the moment of his wife’s death with her photo and her name written backward.