Unemployment

Bea’s unemployment is a turning point in which the loss of a job exposes a deeper estrangement from the career she once pursued with conviction. Dismissed from her architecture firm just as her engagement is falling apart, she receives 1,250 euros in severance and leaves without protest; soon afterward, she finds herself asking whether she wants to return to architecture at all.

The Dismissal

On the Monday after the party that precipitated the breakup with Víctor, Bea goes to work to find out whether she has really been fired. The answer is yes. She accepts 1,250 euros in severance and makes no scene. The dignified anger she had shown at the party has passed, and the human-resources representative seems more upset than she is. Whether that sympathy is sincere or a way to prevent a public confrontation, it succeeds with Bea.

Her departure is also marked by avoidance. Having hidden in a closet when Víctor came to Chavela’s apartment, Bea now makes elaborate efforts not to encounter him at the office. She slips from one ficus to another, drawing puzzled looks from colleagues. The contrast between the dramatic rupture of the party and this almost farcical maneuvering underscores how little control she feels she has over the events reshaping her life.

A Profession Under Strain

The dismissal does not create Bea’s dissatisfaction with architecture so much as make it impossible to ignore. At the beach, trying to recover from the family’s reception and to stop thinking about Víctor, she recognizes the difference between impulsively leaving and accepting the consequences: she has to consider where she will live, where she might find work as an architect, and whether she wants to keep spending herself on grand projects that rarely come to fruition. In her view, the one time such a project does materialize, the reward is being fired.

At thirty-one, Bea wonders whether there is still time to choose another profession. Her joking possibility of designing lamps gives the uncertainty a lighter edge, but it does not resolve it. She has become deeply disappointed in architecture and feels that the preceding two years have taken her further from the work that once excited her.

The Career She Has Lost Sight Of

During a sleepless night, Bea notices that the mattress is tilted and uses her phone as a light to inspect beneath the bed. She pulls out cardboard boxes filled with university notes she had kept in case she might need them again, along with one or two projects she remembers with pride. The discovery turns a physical inconvenience into a reckoning with the distance between her student ambitions and her present circumstances.

Seven years have passed since she finished her architecture degree. In the meantime, six years of hard work at two different studios have worn down her desire to succeed and her wish to keep designing buildings. Bea fears that, in a single week, she may have lost her fiancé, her job, and her sense of vocation. Her anxiety is not only about what work will come next; it is about whether the professional future she once imagined still belongs to her.

Unemployment and Dislocation

The job loss arrives amid several simultaneous upheavals, so Bea cannot treat it as an isolated career setback. At the beach, she weighs the practical questions of housing and employment against the possibility that she no longer wants to pursue architecture. Her return to the sea she missed while living in Madrid offers a sharp contrast to that uncertainty: the familiar shoreline remains something she loves, while her profession has become a source of disappointment rather than belonging.

The narrative leaves Bea’s next occupation undecided. What it establishes is the scale of the break: she has lost her position, doubts the vocation behind it, and must begin imagining a future beyond the career that had organized much of her adult life.