It was twelve o’clock when they passed through the gates of the cemetery. They had chosen a somber stone, with a cross so discreetly carved that it was scarcely visible. That austerity contrasted with the heavy bronze crucifixes and relief inscriptions of the other tombs. The burning noon sun conferred upon the graves and that consecrated ground—empty in the stifling heat—a reality that silenced anything not springing from pure stone. The thought of ghosts or lunatics bringing the dead back to life in a virtual space was an impossibility in that place where there was nothing but graves housing bones and her father’s pain. A pain that was beginning to owe more to age than anything else.

“Have you arranged to see Luisa today?” she asked.

Luisa was the woman he was currently dating.

“Not today,” he answered.

Then he laid a hand on his wife’s gravestone, adorned with lilies from the best florist in the city. They would wilt by nightfall.

She went back to compulsively visiting Apep Otein’s page, which was eerily silent. There were still no other contacts. She doubled her dose of antidepressants and for forty-eight hours the surge of fluoxetine into her bloodstream left her either laughing out loud at nothing or listlessly gazing at the photo of the swimming pool. When her state stabilized, a new image appeared on the page.

It was her mother, lying on a stretcher next to an ambulance. Her father was holding her hand. The image, a bird’s-eye view, encompassed the street, the vehicle, the paramedics and Pepa Nieto, who, barely able to breathe, had decided that evening to have herself admitted to the hospital where she would die. She remembered the scene, not from having seen it before in a photograph, but because she was the person observing it from the living room window. “My final journey,” her father later told her Pepa said on the way to the hospital. Her mother had looked up at her for a moment and made a brief gesture in which there was neither pain nor fear because both of those needed strength, and Pepa was exhausted.

It wasn’t beyond the bounds of possibility that the photo had been taken by a neighbor. However, the residents of the two apartments above were elderly married couples who didn’t seem like they would ever do that sort of thing. And even if the neighbors had been given to eccentric pastimes, she was certain that the image came from her own mind. The view was from the living room window. And what was frozen in the snapshot was her mother’s gestured confirmation that she had seen her at the window.