Armentia is an affluent neighborhood of Vitoria-Gasteiz, but in the book it is also the address at which a family’s private life becomes a public catastrophe. Alice Espanet and Ritxi’s home is where Mélanie finds their twins drowned, and where the police response, the neighborhood’s curiosity, and the narrator’s later return gather around the same unsettling contrast: the house looks composed, while its history resists being contained by its walls.

Setting and Architecture

The house stands in a neighborhood described as having the city’s highest per-capita income. It is set beside an open field used for a popular annual pilgrimage, near a beautiful Romanesque basilica, and at a reasonable distance from the other detached houses. In the narrator’s November visit, the building appears at once distinct and locally rooted: its upper floor has a glass façade, now covered by gray blinds, while the rest resembles a traditional farmhouse, with exposed timber and a long, pitched roof. Its form is emphatic and symmetrical, yet sober beneath the rain.

Alice Espanet and Ritxi had moved into the house less than four years before the deaths, after prolonged trouble with an unreliable star architect. That recent beginning matters to the way the narrator sees the building: it is a designed home whose intended order seems to persist even after the events inside have broken the idea of domestic safety. When the narrator returns, the house is closed and empty, but someone still keeps its garden neat. The care of the grounds does not reveal who is responsible or what will happen to the property; it sharpens the contrast between an outwardly maintained place and the violence attached to it.

The Discovery and the Emergency

The house’s most consequential afternoon comes in midsummer, on a Thursday, when Mélanie returns from her four hours off. She has spent the time cycling with a young man in Salburua Park; mud clings to her sandals and ankles. After locking her bicycle behind the house, she enters cautiously, hoping the twins may be asleep and that she might be able to take a shower. She hears nothing as she checks the kitchen, living room, and Alice Espanet’s study.

On the stairs, Mélanie feels a vibration and experiences an impulse to flee, one she has felt before while working in the house but does not follow. At the top, she sees the twins lying on their parents’ bed, almost covered by the duvet, their eyes closed. Alice Espanet sits beside them in an upholstered striped chair. Mélanie calls for urgent help, asking for an ambulance and police; the recorded call lasts two minutes and includes communication difficulties, sighs, crying, and disbelief. The account emphasizes that Alice remains still in the chair throughout the call. The house, previously a private residence with quiet rooms and familiar routines, becomes the point from which emergency services and the Ertzaintza mobilize.

A Public Scene Around a Private House

After the call, the house fills with people. Mélanie waits outside on the entrance steps, hugging her knees and looking at the mud on her ankles; inside, she is questioned and can barely breathe or speak. Someone gives her water, and another person offers her a white pill, which she swallows without asking what it is. For hours, ambulance lights and police cars illuminate the front of the chalet. In the warm summer evening, passersby, runners, and neighbors approach, while rumors grow increasingly lurid. The narration makes the scene feel almost like a gathering, but one organized around shock and speculation rather than celebration.

Ritxi arrives shortly before the judge, having driven from Madrid with a chauffeur. He witnesses the twins’ bodies being placed in large gray bags and Alice Espanet being taken away in a police car, hastily dressed in leggings and a loose Pilates shirt. She is not handcuffed, which brings him a measure of relief. He calls her name once; she does not turn. The house is thus not only the setting of the discovery but also the place from which the family is visibly divided: the children leave in bags, Alice in a police car, and Ritxi is left watching.

Return, Evidence, and the House’s Afterlife

In November, the narrator visits Armentia with Niclas, shortly before an Euskadi award ceremony. The weather is harsh: rain sweeps the road and shakes the trees, and their single umbrella cannot keep all three dry as Niclas carries their sleeping child. The narrator wonders whether the house gives off a dark atmosphere; Niclas denies it. The narrator also recognizes that the rain, the approaching dusk, and the discomfort of standing before the house could account for the feeling. This uncertainty matters: the building’s sinister force is not presented as an objective property, but as something produced by knowledge of what happened there.

The narrator wonders whether neighbors bring visitors past the façade and recount the deaths, or instead treat the house as a taboo to protect the neighborhood’s reputation and property values. No neighbors appear, so these remain questions rather than reported facts. The narrator notes that in Hong Kong and Japan, houses associated with suicides or crimes may be treated as stigmatized properties, with their histories affecting how people search for or value them. The comparison gives the empty house a wider social afterlife without establishing its sale or its neighbors’ actual response.

The investigation later returns to the house through its evidence. Security cameras rule out anyone else entering during the deaths; the autopsy confirms that the twins drowned in the bathtub, and the water samples match. The narrator describes these findings as clarifying the crime but not the “ghost”: forensic certainty establishes what happened, yet does not explain its human meaning. At the house, the bathtub was an ordinary green plastic container with a cartoon seal on one side; in court it becomes an exhibit carried before the jury. The object links the domestic rooms of Armentia to the public process of judgment, while the house itself remains closed and empty. Its significance lies in that unresolved passage from home to crime scene, from carefully kept property to a place the narrator cannot encounter as merely architecture.