Grieving and Starting Over

Grieving and Starting Over is a recurring concern in the novel, expressed through both the fragile possibility of a new relationship and a family’s response to a death. Bea’s growing attachment to Diego collides with his unresolved grief for his wife and her own hurt after Víctor; later, Ángela’s death turns grief into a shared act of remembrance, as the family reads her notebook and follows her wishes. These arcs resist the idea that starting over requires forgetting. Instead, the past remains present—in hesitation, in an object kept close, and in the choices that survivors make together.

Grief and the Limits of Readiness

Bea and Diego’s connection develops under unequal but related burdens. For Bea, their sexual encounters begin as a way to feel alive after her painful separation from Víctor, not as the start of a promised relationship. But she becomes emotionally invested. When Diego looks at her with disappointment and sadness after her misjudgment involving his mother-in-law, Bea falls silent, recognizing that she has hurt him without knowing how to repair the moment. Diego then insists that their relationship return to a professional level, as they had previously agreed, and says that even her access to the estate may depend on whether his mother-in-law will allow her back.

His boundary is not presented as simple rejection. Diego explains that his wife’s death is too recent and that he is not ready to become emotionally involved or take another step with someone he barely knows. He also says that his daughter has started having nightmares again. He cannot be sure whether her grandmother has told her something or whether she senses the strained atmosphere, but he fears that the situation could affect her. His concern for his daughter makes the consequences of adult intimacy part of his responsibility as a parent; his withdrawal is both a refusal of romance and an attempt to protect the precarious household around him.

Bea accepts that Diego’s explanation is reasonable, even as it hurts. Alone, she debates why the end of an arrangement that never became a relationship feels like a loss. She recalls that the encounters were few—five in two days—and recognizes that she had hoped for sex without emotional involvement. Her self-reproach connects her attachment to the vulnerability left by Víctor, while her judgment of Diego is complicated by the fact that he had not promised her anything. She sees that his grief has not disappeared simply because he can sometimes seem open and expressive; he still lives with his in-laws and remains tied to the family life built around his late wife.

Distance, Attachment, and Repetition

The separation does not immediately end Bea’s feelings. She considers calling Diego under a pretext, then stops herself and repeats a resolve that he is finished for her. Her attempt to discipline grief through a mantra—refusing to suffer for what never was, is not, and will not be—shows how she tries to turn uncertainty into a definite ending. Yet her continuing hurt undermines the certainty of that decision. The words are an effort to manage attachment, not proof that it has vanished.

Her conversations with Chavela bring the contradiction into view. Bea admits that she misses Diego’s presence and has grown fond of his daughter, whom she had seen regularly while discussing the progress of the house. Chavela recognizes Bea’s infatuation, while Bea insists that she cannot fall for a man who does not want her and is still grieving. Bea also remembers the vivid contrast in Diego: usually elusive, he could become warm, expressive, and playful when he let himself go. That remembered openness helps explain why she struggles to treat the relationship as merely physical, even after he has withdrawn.

Bea understands that her misjudgment with Diego’s mother-in-law may have made matters worse, and she fears that the threatened publication of a report about the chestnut trees could damage his business and intensify his anger. At the same time, she does not reduce his decision to the incident alone: he told her he was not ready, and she knows his grief is real. The relationship therefore remains unresolved in a precise sense. Bea is trying to accept a limit that Diego has clearly set, while her attachment, her concern for his family, and the work connecting them keep that limit emotionally difficult to inhabit.

Ángela’s Notebook and the Family’s Mourning

After Ángela dies, grief becomes a family experience organized around a specific object: her red Hello Kitty notebook. Bea’s brother and father found Ángela unconscious at the kitchen table and called an ambulance. Bea is relieved not to have been present, unable to imagine finding her mother already dead. After the funeral and cremation, she retreats to her room with the notebook. Its familiar cover and its presence in the room where she spent the previous spring make it a tangible continuation of the time she shared with Ángela. Bea reflects that the painful events that brought her home from Víctor had also allowed her to spend those months with her mother and family.

The notebook changes the family’s understanding of Ángela’s final months. Bea explains that her mother had learned from tests that her heart would not last much longer, though she did not know precisely how much time remained. She had kept the information from the family in the hope that speaking of it would not make it happen, and had instead begun writing notes. The discovery does not undo the loss or give Bea the final hours she wishes she could have shared with her mother. It does, however, give the family access to Ángela’s thoughts and intentions, turning private writing into a means of witnessing and remembrance.

When Bea reads Ángela’s note to Débora, the letter addresses her daughter’s inherited empathic gift without demanding that she take up her mother’s work. Ángela accepts Débora’s choices and recognizes that photography may be a vocation through which she can empathize with others and channel pain. She leaves open the possibility that Débora might one day take over the consultation, but makes clear that the choice belongs to her. The note thus makes inheritance an invitation rather than an obligation: Ángela’s values can continue in a different form, without requiring her daughter to reproduce her life.

Another note asks Bea and her sisters to make peace with one another, while suggesting that Ángela’s death may already have helped bring them together. The family’s reading is not only an encounter with what Ángela knew; it also gives the living a reason to speak and listen to one another. The notebook allows her to remain present in family decisions and relationships, even as the family acknowledges that it has lost its most important member.

Ritual and Continuing Life

Ángela’s instructions also shape the family’s farewell. She asks for her ashes to be scattered from the cliff near the Romanesque chapel that Irene arranged to have moved there. It had been one of Ángela’s favorite places, and she had joked about Irene turning it into a destination for pilgrims. Her note makes room for the local people who might interpret the scattering in religious terms, treating the possibility with humor rather than trying to control what others believe.

The family goes to the cliff two days later. Though they had hoped to keep the occasion private, many people come to accompany them, and they do not turn anyone away; the support helps them endure the days after the death. In October, under a clear sky and over a calm sea, the ashes fall into the water rather than blowing back onto the family, as Bea had feared the night before. The ritual gives grief a place and a shared action, but it does not close the relationship. Ángela’s notebook, her wishes, and the values she expressed continue to guide her family. In parallel, Bea’s experience with Diego shows that a new attachment cannot be summoned by resolve alone. Across both strands, beginning again means carrying loss into a changed life, not declaring it over.