Alice and Angela

Alice Espanet and Angela’s mother-daughter relationship is one of the book’s most unsettling contrasts: Alice carries and comforts her newborn daughter, then later kills her and her twin brother, Alex. The narrative follows this bond through a moment of apparent care, the deaths, and their legal aftermath, while resisting any simple account of what Alice understood or felt.

Mother and newborn

Angela is one of the twins born to Alice Espanet and Ritxi. On the journey home from the clinic, she is with Alice in the back seat while Alex remains hospitalized. The trip is short, but the family is not yet together: Ritxi drives, hopeful and talkative, while Alice appears exhausted and withdrawn. He initially attributes her silence to having had to leave Alex behind, expecting that they will see him again that afternoon.

At a traffic light, Alice releases Angela from the car seat, unfastens her own belt, and gets out carrying the baby. Ritxi follows and finds her in a doorway, singing a lullaby. Her conduct is abrupt and alarming, but the scene also records a concrete act of holding and soothing her daughter. Alice explains that they cannot remain in the car because its fumes will kill Angela. The narrative does not establish that the car posed such a danger; it presents the belief as part of a moment whose meaning is not settled by the outward gesture of care.

The twins’ deaths

The later account describes the killing of both children as planned. Alice chose a Thursday afternoon when the nanny was free and her husband was away. She fed the twins mashed pear and some formula, then undressed them. The account describes her drowning one child, laying that baby on the bed, and then taking the other. The autopsy confirmed that this was their final snack.

The sequence cannot be reconstructed with certainty. Alice has said that she does not remember which child she killed first, and the forensic evidence can establish only that both died at around the same time. The narrative’s uncertainty is specific and consequential: it does not allow the reader to assign a distinct order or separate final moment to Angela and Alex. The relationship ends in an act that destroys both children, but the available evidence does not supply a reliable account of Alice’s thoughts as she acted.

Naming Angela in court

For much of the account, the twins are referred to as babies, bodies, or ashes. At trial, the prosecutor is the first to say their names: Alex and Angela. The narrator recognizes then that the names had not been known to her, and that she had not noticed their absence. Naming them changes the terms in which the deaths can be encountered. The children are no longer only the objects of the case or the subject of forensic evidence; Angela is identified as a particular daughter, with a name and a place in the family.

That change does not soften the facts of the crime. Instead, it makes the loss more difficult to keep at a distance. The narrator reflects that having names makes everything harder, while noting that the names are spoken only a few times in court. The gap between the specificity of Alex and Angela as people and the trial’s sparse use of their names becomes part of the book’s account of how legal proceedings can turn children into evidence.

Mental illness and legal responsibility

The defense advanced mental illness as grounds for Alice’s exoneration under Article 20.1 of the Spanish Criminal Code, which provides for exemption from criminal responsibility when a psychological abnormality or disturbance prevents a person from understanding the unlawfulness of an act or acting in accordance with that understanding. At trial, the prosecutor challenged the psychiatrist on the basis for diagnosing Alice with postpartum psychosis. He acknowledged that the assessment relied on Alice’s conduct and her own account, rather than an official diagnosis that independently confirmed the condition.

This dispute affects how the book frames the mother-daughter relationship after Angela’s death: the court must assess Alice’s mental state, but no testimony can restore the daughter or establish the exact order of events. The jury accepted the defense of insanity, and the judge replaced imprisonment with outpatient psychiatric treatment. The book gives no basis for claiming that this decision restored the relationship or resolved the questions raised by the killings.

Narrative context

The narrator’s own account of motherhood supplies a parallel, not an explanation of Alice. She describes maternal identity as capable of overwhelming other parts of the self, and writes of the boredom, confinement, and repetitive labor that can accompany caring for a baby. She also recalls the intense pleasure of meeting her son at nursery and feeling that his vitality might enter her writing. These reflections complicate an ideal of effortless, uniformly joyful motherhood, but they do not equate ordinary ambivalence with violence or establish Alice’s motives.

Against that broader inquiry, Angela’s relationship with Alice is rendered through irreconcilable details: a mother carrying a newborn out of a car and singing to her, a mother who later kills her children, and a legal case in which the daughter’s name is briefly spoken aloud. The account preserves the uncertainty surrounding Alice’s mental state while keeping Angela’s particular identity visible within a story that might otherwise reduce her to a victim, a body, or a charge.