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that next month. Understood?”
    “Yes, sir. I’ll do my best.” Since I still didn’t know what was going on, I couldn’t make any promises about what I could do or couldn’t do.
    “So it’s settled. Turn off your computer and make tracks out of here. I hope to see you on Monday.”
    “Thank you, sir.”
     
    I was not one hundred percent certain how I got out of Curlin’s office and over to the parking garage to get in my car and back home again. I know I was hyperventilating at least part of the way down the elevator. I am not normally subject to tremors, so I must not have had any trouble driving, except for maybe a stray scream or two.
    I tossed my purse and my keys on the table and dashed into the kitchen. I needed a cold drink and I had a half-empty bottle of lemon vodka chilling in the freezer. The other option was an unopened bottle of acai berry juice, purchased a couple of months ago as part of a health and wellness regimen that hadn’t been quite as regimented as maybe it should have been. I decided to pour a big glass of the acai berry juice with just the littlest tiniest drop or two of vodka, for balance. It tasted foul, and I got a big blue splash of acai berry stain on my silk blouse. I gulped it down anyway, and then poured a glass of ice water as a chaser.
    When I was breathing normally and not talking to myself, I sat down at my computer and clicked on my browser. I took a quick glance at my personal e-mail account first, and recoiled when it reported that I had seventy-seven unread e-mails. That was not a good sign. That was a very bad sign. I took a two-week vacation on a cruise ship last summer and hadn’t come back to seventy-seven unread e-mails. Reading them all seemed like a lot of work to handle all at once. I opened up a new tab and pulled up Facebook, on the theory that social networking might provide the facts I was looking for in a digestible format.
    I found that I had eighty new friend requests and twenty-eight new messages. The number of notifications looked more like an area code for a rural part of the country.
    This is not good , I told myself. This is all kinds of not good. Something I did, somehow, went viral, and I can’t control it.
    Find the facts. That was my mantra at work. Find the facts. Once you had the facts, you could figure out what to do with them.
    Not good not good not good.
    Find the facts. Something has happened. You don’t know what it is.
    Start with your last Facebook post. That should give you a clue.
    That sounded reasonable enough. I didn’t remember what I had posted last on Facebook—likely a check-in at some bar or other—but I couldn’t imagine that anyone cared about it. Still, it made sense to check. I ignored the part of my mind that was busy panicking and clicked on my name.
    About fifty or so of my closest friends and acquaintances had put a link in my Facebook timeline to a story in a blog called Curtains, which was a morbid offshoot of the Gawker Media empire. The story was entitled, “Get the Hankies Out: This Obituary Is the Most Maudlin Thing Ever.”
    This is about Sheldon Berkman , I thought. Has to be. I don’t know anyone else who’s died this week. But that didn’t make sense. Sheldon Berkman didn’t appear to be the least bit interesting. His obituary had been so boring that I hadn’t bothered to finish it.
    Maybe that was a mistake.
    I clicked on the link from the Gawker article and read the obituary all the way through, for the first time:
     
BERKMAN, SHELDON, 67, of Cape May, passed away on Monday, March 12. He was a native of Cherry Hill, the son of the late Aaron Berkman and Hannah Berkman. He retired to Cape May four years ago. He served for twenty years in the United States Air Force, retiring as a technical sergeant. He served at Elmendorf, Dyess, and McGuire Air Force Bases. After retirement from active duty, he worked as a machinist in the engineering division of PF Avionics in Lakehurst. Funeral services will be