Alice and the twins’ mother-son relationship

Alice Espanet’s relationship with her twins is the book’s most devastating account of motherhood turned toward destruction: it begins in pregnancy, passes through the unstable routines of care, and ends with Alice drowning the babies and describing a mental collapse she says she cannot remember. The narrative places that crime beside the ordinary exhaustion, ambivalence, and vulnerability of parenting, but does not collapse those experiences into one another. Instead, it asks how intimacy and responsibility can be narrated when the mother herself becomes the source of lethal harm.

Pregnancy and the Arrival of Motherhood

Alice’s pregnancy initially unsettles her relationship with Ritxi. For several days, she privately blames him for it, even though she knows he wants to become a father and is already interested in the practical vocabulary of a future baby, including the maxi-cosi and transitional objects. Her first response is not immediate welcome: she experiences doubt and bewilderment before, after those first uncertain days, accepting the responsibility and beginning to want the child. That change matters because the account refuses a simple story in which maternal desire is either present from the beginning or absent altogether.

The pregnancy also enters a relationship already marked by unequal adjustment. The Narrator describes Ritxi as the partner who gives while Alice receives: he leaves well-paid work in London when she decides to return to her home region, adapts to an unfamiliar city and a job for which he is overqualified, and accepts a much lower salary. This context does not explain or excuse Alice’s later violence. It does show that the twins arrive within an intimate life in which care, sacrifice, and gratitude are already difficult to distribute evenly.

Care as Routine and Uncertainty

Mélanie, a twenty-two-year-old au pair from Orléans who has been working for Alice and Ritxi since the twins were a month old, describes care as shaped by Alice’s unpredictable involvement. At times Alice watches and corrects her closely, advising her how to hold the babies, change their nappies, and apply cream. At other times Alice gives Mélanie a brisk, cheerful farewell and shuts herself in her studio, saying she will paint and leaving the au pair alone with the children. Mélanie prefers those periods of distance, despite the workload, because Alice’s close supervision can turn critical or despondent.

Alice’s anxieties repeatedly attach themselves to the babies’ bodies and routines. Mélanie recalls her worrying that they were not gaining enough weight, then that they seemed too fat; that they slept too little, then that their naps were lasting too long; and wondering whether they might be ill. The testimony gives the relationship a daily texture of feeding, changing, monitoring, and interpreting signs. It also makes Alice’s caregiving neither consistently attentive nor simply absent: her attention can become intense scrutiny, while her withdrawal leaves practical care to someone else.

The Drowning and Its Immediate Aftermath

The relationship reaches its irreversible break on a Thursday afternoon in summer. After her four hours off, Mélanie returns to the House of Armentia, locks her bicycle at the back, and enters quietly, hoping the twins may be asleep. Near the top of the stairs she feels a vibration and experiences an impulse to flee, but continues to the partly open bedroom. There she sees the babies on their parents’ bed, almost covered by the duvet, and Alice seated beside them in a nightdress.

When Mélanie touches the bundles, she finds that the babies are not sleeping: they are naked, cold, motionless, with purple lips, and the sheet is still wet. Alice tells her calmly that they are all right. Mélanie, trembling, calls for emergency help; the recorded call lasts two minutes and includes confusion, crying, and disbelief. The account presents Alice as remaining in the chair throughout, exposed and unmoving. Elsewhere the event is reduced to its bluntest facts: two babies drowned in a bathtub in the middle of summer. That contrast between the plain statement and Mélanie’s detailed discovery gives the twins’ deaths both the force of a physical scene and the coldness of a case record.

Conflicting Accounts and Legal Meaning

At trial, Alice describes the killing as her worst nightmare and speaks of a ghostly call she had heard but resisted. She says she had not wanted to be alone with the children because she feared that, on a particularly weak day, she would be carried away by it. Although she had seemed better at the time and painting helped her, she had only recently begun staying alone with the babies for short, quiet periods. In her account, everything suddenly darkened; when it cleared, she saw her children wet and cold on the bed. She says she tried to breastfeed them, although she had never done so before, and remembers nothing else until waking in hospital.

The Narrator initially hoped this testimony might make Alice understandable, but finds its sequence of nightmare, ghost, darkness, and amnesia unconvincing. The account therefore preserves a conflict rather than resolving it: Alice offers an explanation rooted in a break in consciousness, while the Narrator hears a constructed and confused story. In the courtroom, a psychiatrist acknowledges that the diagnosis of postpartum psychosis rests on Alice’s conduct and her own account, with no official diagnosis to confirm it. The twins’ relationship with their mother is thus also the site of a dispute about what can be known, what can be proved, and how mental illness bears on criminal responsibility.

Motherhood in the Book’s Wider Frame

The Narrator’s reflections on her own motherhood provide a deliberate contrast, not an equivalence. After giving birth, she describes feeling incomplete and fraudulent when walking alone, as if motherhood had become the identity through which strangers should understand her. Three months of broken sleep, frequent weight checks, and detailed tracking of the baby’s bodily functions have, she says, pushed her former identities as writer, worker, partner, and daughter into exile. She also acknowledges wanting to escape from the child, only to find that separation does not free her from thinking about him.

That conflict coexists with tenderness. When Erik sees the Narrator at nursery, he crawls toward her with his arms open, and she urges herself to cherish his body and the intensity of their attachment. Yet she doubts that such closeness will enter her writing, and elsewhere describes the boredom and relentless labor of feeding, changing, washing, and settling a baby. Her account insists that love can exist alongside fatigue, frustration, and a wish for solitude; it does not make those ordinary contradictions a forecast of violence.

The distinction becomes especially clear when Erik is hospitalized with viral meningitis. The Narrator feels exposed and powerless as a needle enters his spinal cord; Niclas holds her, and after the diagnosis they spend the night beside the child’s cot. Niclas tells her they are doing well, while she recognizes that she means to do better herself. Against this scene of shared fear and continued care, Alice’s relationship with the twins remains unassimilable: the book can examine maternal vulnerability and the social demand for limitless devotion, but it does not turn those pressures into an explanation that erases the deaths.