Alice Espanet and Ritxi

Alice Espanet and Ritxi’s relationship is presented as a rapid courtship that became a marriage, then as a partnership under the strain of Alice’s chronic sadness and the demands of parenthood. After their twins’ deaths, Ritxi’s devotion takes the form of intensive, continuing care; yet the account of their life afterward remains incomplete, filtered through people with personal stakes in how Alice’s condition is understood.

Courtship and Marriage

Two months after meeting in Burdeos, Alice had settled in Vitoria-Gasteiz. Weekend visits became week-long stays, and soon she had moved nearly all her belongings into the attic apartment Ritxi owned in the city center. The account gives the move a tangible, spare detail: Alice brought a suitcase full of makeup and another full of clothes. Her rapid arrival in Ritxi’s home preceded an equally swift public progression toward marriage.

Ritxi introduced Alice to his friends at a dinner hosted by their social group. They later recalled little about the occasion beyond a young, beautiful, discreet woman, broadly the person they had expected to meet. When a wedding invitation arrived a few months later, it came as no surprise. The group arranged a bachelor weekend for Ritxi in Ibiza, with a sailboat, champagne, and drugs; the wives and girlfriends, more reluctantly, took Alice out for her own celebration, including brunch and an afternoon at a spa.

Alice did not become close to the women in the group. A representative of them later testified that they treated her well, but that Alice kept her distance: she declined to join conversations and answered with an ironic smile. She suggested that she had suffered and looked down on the others as privileged, sheltered women. The recollections offer no clear account of what lay behind this reserve, but they establish that marriage brought Alice into Ritxi’s social circle without making her feel part of it.

Unequal Adaptation and Parenthood

The relationship is also described through an imbalance of accommodation. Ritxi had left a well-paid but exploitative job in London when Alice decided to return to her homeland. He then adjusted to an unfamiliar, unpleasant city and a job for which he was overqualified, earning far less. The narrator describes him as bearing responsibility for keeping the partnership together, adapting to Alice’s whims and changes of mood. In this telling, his giving and her receiving became an assumed order—one that did not make gratitude easy for her.

That account belongs to the narrator’s retrospective framing of Alice and Ritxi’s marriage, not to a direct statement of either partner’s private understanding. The book’s wider reflections on motherhood offer a separate, deliberately personal point of comparison: the narrator recalls initially resenting Niclas for wanting a child, then coming to embrace the responsibility. Her own experience makes room for ambivalence without treating it as proof that love or care is absent; it should not be mistaken for evidence about Alice’s feelings toward Ritxi.

Attempts to Help Alice

At Ritxi’s trial testimony, his hesitation and strained manner accompany a description of the measures taken when Alice was chronically sad. The couple hired Mélanie to lighten the workload, brought a reiki teacher to the house, and arranged Pilates classes twice a week. In Ritxi’s account, Alice seemed to be improving, and the situation appeared manageable. The measures show a household responding to distress through practical help and activities intended to ease it, even as the later outcome makes their apparent success painfully uncertain.

The narrator acknowledges that, in retrospect, the help had not been enough, but the record does not establish what more Ritxi could have done. One particular detail complicates his testimony: the traffic incident he recounted was not recorded in the municipal police files, a discrepancy demonstrated at trial. That inconsistency bears on the reliability of an individual part of his account; it does not, by itself, explain the marriage or settle what he understood about Alice’s condition.

Care After the Twins’ Deaths

After the twins’ deaths, the available accounts describe Ritxi devoting his time, money, and love to Alice. She was said to live in isolation, take strong medication, and never be left alone: when Ritxi was at work, a nurse watched over her. She travelled frequently to Barcelona to see a Belgian psychiatrist, making the journey from car to plane to taxi and back in a single day. The psychiatrist reportedly believed she was improving, while warning that treatment would take time, relapse remained a serious possibility, and having more children could not be recommended.

Ritxi’s care is inseparable from his grief. He had lost the twins permanently and wanted, at least, to recover the woman he regarded as the love of his life. The narrator presents his commitment as apparently inexhaustible, but also marks the limits of the evidence: these details come from Ritxi and the psychiatrist, both interested parties, while Alice’s daily life inside the home remains largely unknown. No private investigator followed her, and no separate party pressed a claim on behalf of the children. The result is a portrait of devotion after catastrophe that is moving but not complete: Ritxi’s care is visible, while Alice’s own experience and the full history of the relationship remain partly beyond the record.