Amaia Salazar—James

Amaia Salazar and James’s relationship combines love, practical co-parenting, and a shared effort to imagine a home in Elizondo. Its defining movement is from the strain of early parenthood and competing obligations toward renewed intimacy and a sense of family they can build together. James’s dependable presence does not erase Amaia’s work or her childhood trauma, but it gives her a relationship in which care can be offered without requiring her to abandon either her responsibilities or her own history.

Intimacy and Reconciliation

Their closeness is not effortless. At one point, an argument leaves Amaia on the verge of answering James, but she chooses not to prolong the quarrel or let them part in anger. Her decision is shaped by what she has seen as a police officer: families receiving news of a death can be burdened by the memory of a final, seemingly trivial estrangement. She leans through the open car window and kisses James. He tells her he loves her as he starts the car; after he drives away, she is left with affection, regret, and the fear that an accident might make their disagreement irreversible.

A later intimate scene marks a change in the relationship’s immediate temperature. Since Ibai’s arrival, Amaia has been reluctant to have sex in the same room as the baby. When she and James make love again, the slow, attentive encounter feels to them like discovering one another anew. Their quiet afterward makes the reconciliation explicit: James says that he is glad she is back and acknowledges that things between them have not been good lately. The scene does not suggest that parenthood’s pressures have vanished; it shows them recovering a form of intimacy that those pressures had interrupted.

Learning to Parent Together

The adjustment to caring for Ibai brings small disagreements into their shared domestic life. Amaia is concerned with feeding schedules and recalls the pediatrician’s advice, while James has given the hungry, unsettled baby a little formula when she was not there. He explains that he has read that a baby should be fed on demand and notes that Ibai drank less than fifteen centiliters. Amaia worries that feeding him continually is not good and argues for respecting the schedule. The disagreement is specific and practical, not a rejection of one another: both are trying to respond responsibly to their child, but they approach the question from different immediate concerns.

Amaia’s work and the change in how she feeds Ibai intensify her private self-doubt. After waking from a confusing dream and finding the baby asleep beside James, she is briefly steadied by Ibai’s peaceful presence. When he wakes hungry and reaches toward her, she remembers that she can no longer feed him herself. James takes him downstairs, while she blames herself as a mother. The moment shows how a routine need can reopen her anxiety even when the child is being cared for; James’s practical intervention allows her to return to work, but it does not instantly quiet her harsh judgment of herself.

Their care is also expressed in ordinary gestures. James rocks Ibai on his shoulder in the living room until the baby falls asleep, and Amaia greets them by teasing him that his dancing has bored their son into sleep. At bedtime, she approaches James and the baby, who is sleeping with a pacifier for the first time after having refused one while breastfeeding. James jokes about the pacifier and makes light of the change in feeding; Amaia responds affectionately, then reminds him that she still has work to do. The scene holds domestic playfulness alongside the persistence of her professional obligations.

Imagining a Home in Elizondo

James turns their increasing visits to Elizondo into a proposal for a more settled future. Since Amaia became pregnant, they have come to the town more often, and he expects to return still more with Ibai. He explains that he likes Baztán and being with Amaia’s family, and suggests that they consider having a house in Elizondo. Amaia is surprised by the proposal and asks whether he means living there; the exchange presents the idea as a possibility they must consider together, rather than as a decision already made.

A visit to Juanitaenea gives that possibility a particular shape. Amaia knows the old house from childhood visits, but her memories of it are fragmentary: her grandmother stands in the foreground, while the house itself seems more like a setting for her grandmother’s life. James, by contrast, is immediately absorbed in what could be done with the property, explaining his ideas to Amaia’s aunt. As Amaia walks through its rooms, opens the shutters, and looks toward the towers of the church of Santiago, she holds Ibai against her in the weak sun. She asks her son whether he would like to live in his great-grandmother Juanita’s house. The question is tender and playful, but it also brings the family’s past into the couple’s imagined future. James appears at the doorway, watching her and asking what Ibai has answered.

Work, Promises, and Mutual Support

The partnership has to make room for two different kinds of commitment. James’s work as an artist reaches a major milestone with an exhibition at the Guggenheim. Amaia understands the importance of the installation: arranging the pieces and adjusting their positions so that the light falls as he wants is among its most absorbing stages for him. When she cannot accompany him, she explains that the suspect arrested the previous day is responsible for the desecrations in Arizkun, tried to kill a woman in Elizondo after holding her for two years, and may also have disturbed the graves at Juanitaenea. He is about to give a statement, and she has to be there.

James says that he understands, but also makes clear that he had expected her to come because the exhibition matters so much to him and they have waited a long time for it. Amaia apologizes and promises to join him as soon as she can. She feels almost like a traitor for missing the event, a measure of how fully she recognizes its significance to him. The exchange is neither a simple triumph of work over love nor a painless accommodation: she remains committed to the investigation, while James is permitted to voice his disappointment without withdrawing his understanding.

That negotiation sits beside evidence of James’s reliability in everyday life. After reading messages from the director of Santa María de las Nieves and closing her laptop, Amaia wonders whether James will be waiting as he promised; she smiles because he always keeps his promises. Their routines also bring work directly into the home: James brings her coffee and Ibai’s bottle while she continues dealing with the case. Domestic support does not mean that Amaia stops working, but that the demands of her work are carried within a household where James takes practical responsibility for their son.

Family Trauma and a Shared Refuge

Amaia’s relationship with James exists alongside the damage done within her family of origin. In a conversation with Ros, Amaia learns that her sister once heard their mother mistake Amaia for her and say that she would not eat her that night. Ros had been frightened enough to return to Amaia’s bed, and had kept the memory secret. Amaia tells her that neither sister could have stopped what was happening as children; she places responsibility instead on their father, the adult who failed to protect her and sent her away from the family home. That history gives particular weight to the family life Amaia and James are trying to make: her fear is not simply a memory, but part of what she brings into motherhood and partnership.

Near the end, after the search for Rosario is called off, Amaia returns to a house that feels empty without Engrasi. Watching Ibai sleep, she embraces James and insists that she knows Rosario is not dead. James holds her and does not contradict her. His response offers neither a solution nor a claim that her certainty is correct; it is companionship in a moment when she cannot accept the loss as settled. Across the relationship, that distinction matters. James’s care appears in kisses, childcare, promises, shared plans, and physical presence, while Amaia remains an officer, a mother, and a daughter confronting unresolved family history. Their partnership is sustained not by removing those pressures, but by making room for them within a life they are trying to build together.