Beatriz's unresolved separation from Diego

Beatriz's unresolved separation from Diego is not a clean break but a painful interval in which anger, longing, grief, and practical crisis continually pull against one another. Bea leaves Cantabria believing she must start over, yet Diego remains on her mind in Madrid; when he returns four months later, her grief for her mother brings them together again in a moment of unexpected vulnerability. The separation's significance lies in that change: it does not resolve their relationship, but it shifts Bea from demanding an explanation to recognizing that she wants Diego's help.

The confrontation before Bea leaves

The day before leaving, Bea sees Diego's pink Mercedes parked in the village square and decides to wait beside it until he appears. She has been trying to reach him and has rehearsed what she wants to say: that he has wronged both her and her sister, and that his contradictory treatment of their relationship has left her entangled in emotional confusion. Bea admits to herself that she has not handled everything well, but she cannot accept being told their encounters were only physical when his conduct seemed to suggest otherwise, or his fighting for her followed by his disappearance.

A drizzle turns into a downpour while Bea stays by the car. Diego approaches, bent against the rain, and sees her only when he nearly collides with her. He invites her into the car, but she refuses. When he explains that his business and the power plant have fallen apart, his savings are gone, and he is trying to keep his in-laws from losing their home, Bea hears another account of obligations that have displaced whatever remains between them. Diego says his daughter and his in-laws are his life and that his daughter must come first; he apologizes for having given Bea another impression.

Bea answers that his daughter, in-laws, and business do not justify leaving their unresolved relationship unaddressed. Diego insists that he has serious problems and cannot spend time on trivialities. That dismissal makes her turn away and walk off through the rain. He runs after her and tries to hold her by the arm, asking that they not part that way. Bea calls the encounter disappointing and describes him as having surpassed the other people who have let her down. The scene closes not with the explanation she came to demand, but with her judgment that she has been treated as insignificant.

Leaving Cantabria and living with the silence

Bea boards the train to Madrid with a knot in her stomach, unlike her usual relief at returning to the city and escaping family life for a while. Madrid, which had felt like her place in the world, now seems unfamiliar: what she once associated with activity and possibility appears instead as stress, dirt, and pollution. Her search for an apartment yields only unpleasant places at excessive prices, and architecture studios do not value her experience, including her work on two unsuccessful treehouses. Recognition from strangers as the woman who confronted a television presenter at a demonstration brings praise, but not the kind of recognition she wants; her brief fame has become an irritation rather than a consolation.

The separation persists as an absence that fills ordinary time. Bea thinks about Diego at night and on waking, at meals, and whenever she goes out. She cannot simply remove him from her thoughts, despite the way their last encounter ended. Chavela stays beside her and invites her to watch Rebeca Ramos's first investigative program about green energy. Bea refuses outright. When the program is cancelled two weeks later, she feels some satisfaction, but it is slight and cannot lift her general gloom.

At Chavela's small apartment, over a glass of honey rum, Bea initially says that what she misses is not simply Cantabria. Chavela asks whether she misses the red-haired man. Bea adds her treehouse and her sisters to the list of absences, and worries that her sisters may not resume speaking to her. Chavela asks whether Diego has made contact; he has not. Her sharp dismissal of Diego and the complications surrounding him contrasts with Bea's continuing preoccupation: the separation is maintained by silence, not by indifference.

Four months apart

Before leaving, Bea had also concluded that her presence in the family home was worsening the strain around her. She felt responsible for Irene's humiliation after losing the mayoralty, even though Irene did not directly blame her, and Débora made no effort to conceal her hatred. Bea understood herself as having come home to escape her own chaos and brought disorder into her family's lives instead. Leaving for Madrid seemed to her the sensible course: find work and an apartment, and try to put those months behind her.

That decision does not restore her old sense of belonging. In Madrid, her inability to settle, the family silence, and the lack of news from Diego converge rather than cancel one another out. The four months without contact become a period of attempted denial: Bea tries not to remember her life with him, but her thoughts repeatedly return to him. The distance therefore remains unresolved on both sides of the encounter. Bea has neither received the conversation she wanted nor ceased to long for the man she accused of abandoning it.

Diego's return and Bea's grief

When Diego visits Bea's family, she trembles at the sight of him and feels the impulse either to be held or to throw herself into his arms, but restrains herself. Her father suggests that Diego take her for a drive so she can get away from the family for a while. In the car, the familiar smell of the leather seat overwhelms her. Bea tells Diego she cannot live without her mother and asks how he managed to live without his wife.

Diego does not present himself as having solved grief. He says he does not know how he endured Diana's absence, that he has spent more than two years making mistakes, and that perhaps he has at last learned something. He offers to help Bea if she wants him to. His response changes the terms of their encounter: rather than arguing over whether her pain counts as a real problem, he recognizes its scale and offers companionship without claiming to have mastered loss.

Bea realizes that she does want his help and that it may be what she needs in order to continue. Diego gets out of the car and walks into the forest among the chestnut trees; Bea follows him to a clearing. The scene does not establish that their relationship has been repaired or that their earlier conflicts have disappeared. It does, however, show Bea accepting the possibility of relying on him after months of trying to deny how much she misses him.

An unfinished separation

The relationship's central tension is visible in the contrast between the two encounters. In the rain, Bea asks Diego to acknowledge what remains between them, while he places the immediate demands of his daughter, in-laws, and collapsing business ahead of that conversation. Months later, she approaches him through bereavement rather than accusation, and he answers with an offer of help grounded in his own imperfect experience of loss.

The separation thus remains unresolved in a precise sense: longing and renewed closeness are present, but the account does not settle the future of the relationship. What changes is Bea's stance. She leaves convinced that she must withdraw from a life that has become chaotic, then discovers that physical distance has not freed her from attachment. At the clearing among the chestnuts, she does not receive a definitive answer about love or a promise of reconciliation. She accepts a form of support that makes continuing possible, leaving their bond open rather than concluded.