The pills didn’t stop her from going to pieces again on July 7, the anniversary of her mother’s death. She opened Facebook as soon as she got up (that morning she and her father were planning to visit the cemetery to put flowers on Pepa’s grave) and found Apep Otein’s first and so far only post: a photograph of a swimming pool. She immediately recognized the sinuous figure-of-eight form, the indigo paint, the whitewashed wall and chainlink fence.

It was the pool from which she used to look down over the Cordovan countryside, and was located in the garden of the house where she’d lived until the age of seven, in a village bisected by a national highway. The photo showed still water, no people. The colors were those of the polaroids her parents used to mount in the family albums, but she didn’t remember having seen one with only the swimming pool.

The image carried her back to a late afternoon, just before dark, when she and her mother were in the water, its warmth on her body contrasting with the cool air. Pepa had made cheese sandwiches and they ate them in the water, slowly moving their legs. Afterward they lay on the lip of the pool, where the ground still retained the heat of the spring sun, and listened to the vehicles passing on the highway. They played at guessing if they were big or small cars, trucks, or trailers.

She was certain that the first photo on Apep Otein’s wall was taken that day when she and her mother watched the sun go down, their swimsuits wet, breathing the pervasive blue smell of chlorine. But that certainty seemed erroneous. Her father had always been the family photographer, and that afternoon he’d been away on business, which explained that unforgettable, extraordinary circumstance: she and her mother alone, with nothing to do except be together.

Before leaving for the cemetery, she checked the albums and boxes and asked her father if he remembered a polaroid of the swimming pool in the house in the country. Even as she spoke, she felt stupid. He never clicked his shutter unless he had people in the frame.

“Maybe it was your mother. I don’t remember taking it. Why do you want to know?” he asked.

Her father was getting over the loss of his wife by then. He’d started internet dating. None of the relationships lasted more than two or three weeks, but that didn’t bother him. Wouldn’t insisting that someone was usurping Pepa’s identity by means of images that had never been outside the apartment cast a shadow on his newly found single-status happiness? She didn’t mention it again.