On more than one occasion she’d searched for her dead relatives on the internet; often for a cousin who had passed on at twenty-nine. He’d been a security software designer and traces of him could still be found on IT forums. She used to read the responses to technical questions and imagine that behind their professional tact was her cousin, whose name spoken by familiar voices carried her back to all the summer vacations they had spent together. She’d show up at his house when the adults were still taking their siestas and they would go cycling through the white streets of the town. She also searched for earlier generations. She typed her great grandfather’s full name into the search engine, or those of the great uncles who had been killed in the war, in the hope of finding some lost information, some mention in an old archive. Naturally, there was nothing, and that void left her speechless, as if the internet had an obligation to contain everything, to alleviate her nostalgia and her thirst for facts. Not long after her mother’s death she did a Google search to discover what was left of Pepa Nieto besides her clothes in the closets, her shoes, her books, her cosmetics, and her toothbrush in a glass. The answer was practically nothing: her name on the webpage of the College of Physicians; the flyer for a talk she’d given in Jaén; an official communication announcing her appointment as a pediatrician; and one other post related to her move to Cordoba.

Apep Otein uploaded a new audio file. It was a violent argument between her mother and father that she had witnessed. She recognized it by the final section: her mother screaming, “Take your hands off me, you son of a bitch!” The slamming of a door that was followed by more shouting and banging. Her father locking Pepa in one of the bedrooms. She heard the child she had been crying, and saw her being locked in another room. In the dark.