Alex

Alex is one of the twins killed by his mother, Alice Espanet. His name is first made explicit to The Narrator in court, where it breaks through the language of the case: the children are no longer only babies or evidence, but Alex and his sister Angela, each with a life that was cut short.

Identity and Family

Alex is identified as one of Alice Espanet’s twin children and Angela’s brother. The account gives the twins a Basque first surname and a French second surname, but does not supply either surname or a birth date. It compresses their lives into a stark contrast: they were born one year and died the next.

Before hearing their names, The Narrator had known them as Alice’s children, the babies, the twins, the bodies, and finally the ashes. She realizes in court that she had never known their names—and had not noticed their absence. Naming Alex therefore changes the emotional terms in which she can think about the case: with names, she finds it harder to keep the dead children at a distance.

Death and the Trial

The account of the twins’ deaths establishes that Alice’s actions were planned. She chose a Thursday afternoon when the babysitter was free and her husband was away, fed the children mashed pear and then some formula, and undressed them. The autopsy confirmed that this was their last snack. Alice drowned one child and then the other, but the record cannot establish which died first; Alice said she could not remember, and the forensic evidence placed their deaths at roughly the same time. The uncertainty over sequence does not distinguish Alex’s fate from Angela’s: both children were killed.

Their names return as the prosecutor begins the closing argument by reminding the court that the children were called Angela and Alex. She presents them as people with lives ahead of them, who needed care and love and were unique. That appeal counters the reduction of the twins to bodies and forensic facts, even as the trial makes their deaths its central subject.

Narrative Significance

Alex’s identity is conveyed through a small but consequential shift in The Narrator’s attention. At first, the children’s names seem unnecessary to her; once the prosecutor says them, their absence from her understanding becomes visible. The names do not resolve the case’s unanswered details, including the order in which the twins died, but they make the loss less abstract.

The Narrator also imagines futures that Alex and Angela might have had: summer camps in Germany, boarding schools in Switzerland, and eventually a prestigious university in the United Kingdom or the United States. These are possibilities, not facts about the children’s lives. Their deliberately expansive, speculative quality measures the distance between an imagined future and the brief lives summed up in the courtroom as birth in one year and death the next.