Alice Espanet and Ritxi’s marriage

Alice Espanet and Ritxi’s marriage moves from a courtship framed by wealth and family legacy into a prolonged effort to have children, and then into the aftermath of the twins’ deaths. Its most consequential reversal comes when Ritxi, rather than seeking the harshest punishment for Alice, helps arrange her defense and remains at her side. The Narrator treats this decision as an intimate fact that resists easy explanation: evidence of a continuing bond, but not an answer to what that bond means.

Courtship and expectations

Ritxi met Alice when she was working as an actress and model on a corporate video for a winery in Burdeos. He was there on a courtesy trip organized by a group promoting viticulture. The Narrator presents the meeting as a familiar kind of sudden attraction, but also records the asymmetries that formed its setting: Ritxi was ten years older, spoke French fluently, appeared wealthy and assured, and had taken over his family’s winery after his father’s sudden death. The business had belonged to the family for five generations; Alice understood Ritxi’s account to carry an expectation that there would be a sixth.

Their first dinner followed a railway strike that left Alice unable to return to Avignon that evening. Ritxi chose a modest bistro and a bottle of Château Latour-Martillac from 2001, while Alice barely tried the wine. He described his studies in Paris and Washington and his responsibility for the family business, but did not yet mention his strategic investments in wind energy and boutique hotels. Alice, in turn, talked about being vegetarian, though the account notes that she ate very little. The scene establishes not just attraction but a difference in their circumstances and in what each could know about the other at the start.

The pursuit of parenthood

After seven months of trying to conceive without success, the couple went to a highly recommended fertility clinic rather than waiting the year they had heard was the usual point for concern. Ritxi felt old and pressed by urgency, and was not accustomed to losing. The clinic became a recurring destination: over two and a half years Alice and Ritxi made twenty-two visits, treating them as excursions and trying to keep their spirits up. Ritxi was the more consistently optimistic and compliant patient. Alice’s mood varied sharply from one visit to another, and she generally said little.

The treatment organized much of their shared life. Consultations could be followed by a day off together and a special meal: in good weather they drove to Pobeña or the Old Port of Algorta; in winter they chose Bilbao, including a Michelin-starred restaurant on the Marzana quay. Alice avoided alcohol and tried to eat carefully while preparing for pregnancy. The clinical process included blood tests, semen analyses, a karyotype, ultrasounds, hormone monitoring, and an initial, uncertain diagnosis of low ovarian reserve. After treatment with Gonal and Ovitrelle, the decisive procedure was artificial insemination. The Narrator evokes the waiting room’s pastel colors, stale magazines, and the quiet competition between patients as part of the emotional landscape in which the couple pursued parenthood.

A blood test confirmed the pregnancy. At the couple’s request, two embryos had been transferred and three others frozen. Their embryos were class B, a rating associated with a medium likelihood of a twin pregnancy; the clinic explained the risks of carrying twins, including pre-eclampsia, restricted growth, premature birth, and cesarean delivery. Both Alice and Ritxi nevertheless wanted to proceed. An ultrasound a few days later showed that both embryos were developing. The account gives Ritxi the greater share of the imagined happiness and Alice the greater share of the caution, a contrast consistent with their different temperaments during treatment without reducing either partner to a single response.

The twins’ deaths and Ritxi’s decision

After the twins’ deaths, Ritxi’s actions became difficult for The Narrator to place within familiar scripts of grief. The Narrator considers the response that might have seemed more predictable: that Ritxi, as a bereaved father, would join the prosecution and seek the greatest possible sentence for Alice. Instead, the day after the children were cremated, he contacted his trusted lawyer and asked for the best criminal defense attorney in the city. Carmela Basaguren, an older lawyer known for her feminist advocacy, accepted the case that day.

The immediate objective was to secure Alice’s release from Zaballa prison. Basaguren’s appeal argued that pretrial detention was unnecessary, citing the lack of a risk of reoffending, Alice’s established ties, and the absence of a flight risk. The defense also signaled that it would seek acquittal on the ground of mental incapacity under Article 20.1 of the Spanish Criminal Code. The prosecution opposed release, emphasizing the gravity of the two murder charges and the relationship aggravating circumstance, and arguing for a possible forty-year prison term. The judge nonetheless granted the defense’s request. Alice was released after surrendering her passport, agreeing to report to court every fifteen days, and paying bail of fifty thousand euros.

For The Narrator, Ritxi’s choice is not made legible by the procedural facts. The questions left open include whether he acted from love, compassion, denial, or some form of moral complicity, and what future he could imagine after the twins’ deaths. The account does not resolve those questions by assigning him a single motive. Instead, his decision stands as the defining contradiction in the marriage: the man who had urgently wanted to become a father now took active steps to free the woman who had killed their children.

Life after release

Alice and Ritxi stayed together and left the city for a small house in Elciego, near Ritxi’s work. Every two weeks they went to court in Vitoria to sign in, with Ritxi beside his wife. Photographers waited for them in the early days, hoping to capture the couple; gradually they stopped appearing. The legal obligation continued even as public attention receded.

Treatment became another regular journey. Every two weeks the couple flew to Barcelona to see a prominent psychiatrist, and Alice began treatment for psychosis. She kept her daily pills in a compartmented plastic case and returned to painting as occupational therapy. The Narrator notes that there are no photographs of Alice from this period: the media moved on, and the public forgot her. The children had become ashes, and, in the book’s bleak formulation, so had the couple. Yet the practical details of their continued life together—shared travel, court appearances, treatment, and Alice’s return to painting—show a relationship continuing after public visibility and any easy account of its future have fallen away.

Marriage as an unresolved bond

The marriage is neither presented as proof of uncomplicated devotion nor explained away as a strategic arrangement. Ritxi’s loyalty had consequences: it helped Alice leave prison and provided the committed support later cited in favor of outpatient psychiatric treatment. A specialist argued that Alice could be treated outside a psychiatric institution, noting both the family’s good financial circumstances and her husband’s commitment. The court ultimately substituted outpatient psychiatric treatment for imprisonment. That outcome makes the couple’s bond part of the legal and practical conditions of Alice’s life after the verdict, not merely a private feeling.

The Narrator’s account also makes the limits of outside interpretation explicit. She can imagine moments of happiness and intimacy in the couple’s earlier life, but imagination cannot recover what Ritxi and Alice said when he collected her from prison, or establish what he expected their future to be. The marriage therefore remains a relation sustained through concrete acts—seeking treatment, attending court together, and staying together—while its central emotional meaning remains uncertain. That unresolved quality gives the relationship its narrative force: love and care persist in the record, but they do not erase the crime, the grief, or the questions of responsibility.