The Narrator

The Narrator is the book’s first-person voice and the investigator of Alice Espanet’s case. Her decisive turn toward that story begins not in a newsroom or courtroom, but during induced labor: amid pain, she recognizes Alice as a woman she had known eleven years earlier. The recollection connects a public accusation she had deliberately avoided with a private past, and turns writing into a means of confronting what she cannot leave unspoken.

Identity and Initial Avoidance

Before the recognition, the Narrator tries to keep the news of Alice’s case at a distance. She changes channels, turns pages, closes windows, and redirects conversations toward the unusual heat. People around her generally understand that the subject is painful in her circumstances, but the case still follows her into ordinary places, including a butcher’s shop, a hairdresser’s, and a wedding. Avoidance is not simple indifference: she describes it as an active, conscious effort, one she manages successfully for a time.

That effort gives the case an intimate charge before she knows why it affects her. The Narrator does not initially explain her reaction or claim insight into Alice’s guilt. Instead, she marks the limits of what she can bear to hear while pregnant. The distance she tries to maintain is eventually broken by memory, not by any new piece of public information.

Recognition During Childbirth

At the beginning of an induced labor, monitored and awaiting the pain to come, the Narrator considers the competing explanations she has encountered for labor pain. Her reflections move between religious accounts, social conditioning, uncertain medical knowledge, and a bodily theory in which pain reaches a more primitive part of the brain. The speculation is wry, but it also establishes a contrast that matters to the scene: language and rational control give way as contractions intensify.

During a powerful contraction, she remembers that she met Alice Espanet eleven years earlier. For one week they lived next door to each other, though Alice did not then go by that name. The Narrator had not thought about the young woman since losing sight of her, and years of avoiding images of the case had made the face difficult to recognize. She attributes the sudden clarity to the force of labor and to the body’s chemistry, describing the recollection as a truth abruptly placed before her. The recognition leaves her breathless; it does not resolve the case, but it changes her relation to it. Alice is no longer only a distant figure in a troubling news story.

Motherhood and a Fractured Sense of Self

The Narrator’s recognition occurs at the threshold of motherhood, and the later consequences of that change sharpen her sense of dislocation. After the Basque Government contacts her, she understands more clearly that she no longer feels like herself. Her response is not to reject motherhood, but to decide that she must reverse the situation somehow and gather the scattered pieces of her former identity. She has one path in mind, though taking it requires deliberation rather than an immediate announcement.

She waits a couple of days before telling Niclas that she plans to use the prize money to take leave from work. The decision emerges alongside the arrival of her child, Erik, and the pleasure of receiving the award is complicated by the guilt she feels while breastfeeding. These details place her attempt to reclaim a self within the practical and emotional conditions of new motherhood, rather than outside them. The case she will investigate is also a possible route back toward intellectual work and a life not wholly defined by being a mother.

Research, Judgment, and the Limits of Representation

During Erik’s two-week nursery adaptation, the Narrator begins laying the foundations of her inquiry. She makes lists, identifies primary sources, considers how to approach the story of Jade/Alice, and names places she needs to visit. Her research begins in the café opposite the nursery: as other parents leave in tears or socialize nearby, she waits for her laptop to start, with Erik in the front carrier and her computer in the pack behind her. The juxtaposition makes the work concrete: investigation takes shape inside the same routine of care that has unsettled her identity.

The lists also become an ethical reckoning. She considers whether her role should resemble that of a defense lawyer or a prosecutor, whether a writer’s task is to judge or to leave judgment to readers, and whether fiction can approach what the known facts cannot establish. A strictly journalistic account might preserve uncertainty but leave the unknowable in darkness; fiction might enter that darkness, yet the prospect of giving form to violence against children makes her tremble. She also weighs whether to alter dates, names, and other particulars for moral, legal, or literary reasons, and whether contacting Alice would illuminate the book or displace its real subject. Her ambivalence remains part of the inquiry rather than a problem she claims to have solved.

Writing as a Necessary Return

The Narrator’s writing is driven partly by the very things she finds difficult to discuss. After a night in which she is crying and disgusted by everything, she records what the evening has yielded in her notebook. She recognizes that certain matters cannot be spoken about easily and takes that difficulty as a reason to write, while still questioning whether doing so is right. Writing is therefore neither a simple cure for her fractured identity nor a claim to possess the whole truth about Alice. It is the method she chooses for returning to a past she had avoided and for examining the uncertainties that return brings with it.

Across these episodes, the Narrator’s movement is from evasion to deliberate engagement: first the news is shut out, then an embodied memory makes it personal, and finally research turns the recognition into a sustained project. Her importance lies in the tension she preserves between witness and interpreter. She has a connection to Alice, but must still decide what that connection permits her to say, what remains unknowable, and how to write without mistaking a shaped narrative for a final judgment.