Delete. Block. Report.

It was part of my job, and one I grew far better at learning to handle like an emotionless robot. They didn’t want to hurt me, they wanted to hurt Nora Sharp. Who didn’t exist. Who wasn’t, actually, me.

And then, just over a year ago, someone using the account name NoraShark sent a DM to Nora’s Instagram account containing a link to a local news article about a Moroccan restaurant on the edge of Holborn. I had reviewed this restaurant. The food was great, and I made that clear in the review. The family who ran it clearly loved what they did. However, the main reason I had gone was to check out their new, heavily promoted live music evenings. The singer was dreadful, so of course a passing comment that people should go for the food rather than the entertainment ended up edited into a headline about serving earplugs alongside the starters.

This new article described how the singer, Layla Alami, who happened to be the daughter of the café owners, had been performing in public for the first time since completing chemotherapy. But of course nobody bothered to find that out until a video of Layla had gone viral, and the restaurant had become a local punchline. The so-called journalist who was supposed to be reviewing the evening certainly hadn’t, because her focus had been on the food and the service. The customers stopped coming, and the owners hadn’t the heart to continue.

They followed up the link with another message:

You did this. I hope you’re proud of yourself for destroying a good family who did nothing but work hard and try to provide a decent life for their children. A beautiful girl is broken. She blames herself. Nobody else does. We blame you.

Despite what Miles and Lucy said, repeatedly, I blamed me, too.

We blocked the account, but over the next few weeks, more messages arrived, usually one every couple of days. The accounts changed every time: NoraShark1, NoraShark2 and so on. The messages ranged from the fairly mild, ‘How can you carry on like normal when other people’s lives have been wrecked?’ to the disconcerting, ‘One day you will know what it is like to feel the pain that you have caused others and when that happens my family can finally rest.’

The final message, sent from NoraShark32, when Lucy and I were both on the brink of contacting the police, said this:

I will find out who you are and then it will begin.

Lucy had found the children of the couple who ran the restaurant on Facebook. The Alami family seemed to be huge, with a community of aunts, uncles, cousins and various other relatives all in continual contact, despite living on three different continents. More online investigating revealed no clues about which family member might be sending the messages. Once they stopped, to be quickly replaced with more trolls eager to tell Nora how much they hated her, we breathed a sigh of relief and put it behind us.