«Ahora están bien»

«Ahora están bien» is a recurring expression associated with Alice Espanet after the deaths of her twins. First spoken at the house, then recalled in the hospital and repeated in police testimony, it acquires a disturbing double force: it sounds like reassurance, but also like an acknowledgment that something irreversible has been done. The phrase becomes a small verbal center of the case, heard by different people and made to carry different implications.

At the House

The expression first comes after Mélanie, the au pair, touches the bundles and realizes that the twins are neither asleep nor moving. Their skin is cold, their lips purple, and the sheet beneath them is still damp. Alice, seated in the armchair, speaks calmly. Mélanie recoils at the sound of her voice; the mother’s composed, almost listless manner deepens the contrast with the scene and with the nanny’s alarm. Mélanie calls for emergency help, while Alice appears not to move or cover her exposed left breast.

In that first setting, the phrase’s apparent reassurance is sharply at odds with what Mélanie has just discovered. Its plainness makes the mismatch more unsettling: it offers a settled conclusion where the nanny sees an emergency. The scene establishes the words not as an explanation of what happened, but as a statement whose meaning is uncertain and whose delivery will shape how others interpret Alice.

Recalled in the Hospital

After her arrest, Alice is taken to Hospital de Santiago. The on-call psychiatrists describe her as disoriented and in shock, and leave open the possibility of dissociative amnesia. She speaks little, but is heard asking where the children are and, in a longer variation of the expression, whether they are all right now. The recurrence places the words beside her apparent confusion: she seems to ask about the twins even as she speaks as though their condition has been resolved.

The hospital account does not settle whether Alice remembers the deaths or understands her own words. When told what happened the next morning, she cries out that it is impossible, then moves between screams, low moans, silence, and renewed trembling and spasms. The contrast between this reaction and her earlier calm complicates any simple reading of the repeated expression as proof of a single, stable state of mind.

Testimony and Competing Readings

At trial, police officers confirm Alice’s composure, the babies’ lack of vital signs, the house’s meticulous order, and Mélanie’s hysteria. Asked whether the accused appeared conscious of what had happened, they point to her repeated assurance that the twins were now all right, as if she had completed a mission. The phrase is thus presented as an indication that she recognized the outcome, not merely as an oddity of speech.

Carmela Basaguren challenges the inference by asking whether such calm is usual in someone who has just committed a homicide. The first officer says it is not: suspects are generally nervous, and scenes are usually chaotic. Yet the officers also allow that every case differs and that shock can produce unusual reactions. The expression therefore remains contested evidence. Its recurrence links the house, the hospital, and the courtroom, while its meaning shifts between reassurance, apparent awareness, and a possible symptom of shock.