Bea Avoids Víctor

Bea’s avoidance of Víctor turns the shock of seeing him kiss a television presenter into a sustained retreat from confrontation. Rather than speak with her fiancé, she stays at Chavela’s apartment, ignores his calls and messages, hides when he comes looking for her, and later dodges him at work; the silence becomes part of the crisis she is trying not to face.

From the party to Chavela’s apartment

After witnessing the kiss, Bea takes refuge with Chavela, whom she describes as her best—and perhaps only true—friend. She acknowledges that the kiss was not the whole story: in her own account, she had also helped push Víctor toward the presenter by refusing to answer him afterward. She ignored his calls and WhatsApp messages, and when he appeared at Chavela’s home, she hid in a wardrobe rather than meet him.

Chavela’s small apartment becomes Bea’s shelter for several days. Bea does not even go home to collect clean clothes, instead borrowing from Chavela’s wardrobe. The jeans are too short and loose at the waist, but she does not care. Chavela serves as her anchor and comfort, using her comic accounts of Tinder dates to help Bea put her own crisis in perspective.

Refusing contact

Víctor tries to reach Bea through other people as well as directly. He sends two friends to act as intermediaries, and also sends his sister; Bea turns them away. Chavela challenges her about refusing to talk to her fiancé, continuing to hide in the wardrobe whenever the doorbell rings, and taking her anger out on the mutual friends who have come as messengers. Bea remains unwilling to engage, even when Chavela points out that those friends are not to blame.

The pattern is more than a single act of hiding. Bea repeatedly chooses not to answer, not to appear, and not to hear what Víctor might say. Looking back, she recognizes that she was not behaving like the woman she had believed herself to be, and says she was not thinking clearly during those days. Her account complicates the simpler version in which she merely witnessed a betrayal: she does not excuse the kiss, but admits that her own withdrawal shaped what followed.

Avoidance at work and its cost

The following Monday, Bea goes to work to find out whether she has really been dismissed. She has: she accepts 1,250 euros in severance pay without making a scene. Her earlier burst of indignation has passed, and the human-resources representative appears more upset about the dismissal than she does. Bea also manages not to cross paths with Víctor, weaving behind the office ficus and jumping from one plant to another as colleagues look at her strangely.

Her evasion therefore follows her from Chavela’s home into the workplace, even as the job loss adds a concrete consequence to an already destabilized period. The plants that conceal her turn an ordinary office into an obstacle course; the comic detail sits beside the seriousness of her refusal to confront Víctor or respond to the changes unfolding around her.

The wider aftermath

Later, amid a demonstration in her hometown, Bea sees the same presenter reporting with a television camera behind her. Press crews are following Bea too, and she connects the public turmoil around her family to the chain of events that began when she met Víctor. Her recollection does not erase the separate causes of the demonstration or her sister’s political difficulties; it shows how Bea experiences her private history as entangled with the upheaval now surrounding her. The earlier hiding in a wardrobe and among office plants thus stands in sharp contrast to the later moment when she is trapped between cameras and chooses to address the presenter directly.