Amaia Salazar’s pregnancy

Amaia Salazar’s pregnancy is a long-awaited and deeply unsettling transition: it fulfills her desire to become a mother while reviving fears she cannot simply set aside. As the pregnancy advances, her body increasingly dictates the pace of her work and daily life, but the deeper conflict is emotional. She expects happiness, yet struggles to imagine the baby as real and to trust the future motherhood represents.

Background and Timing

Amaia became pregnant nine months before the events at the courthouse, while investigating the most important case of her career. The pregnancy therefore developed alongside demanding police work rather than in a separate, protected domestic sphere. The investigation also brought her into contact with Jasón Medina: although his case was distinct from the serial murder case she was pursuing, Teniente Padua invited her to assist because Medina had tried, clumsily, to imitate the serial killer’s methods based on what he had read in the press.

By the time Amaia encountered Padua at the courthouse, her prominent abdomen made clear that she was in the final stage of pregnancy. The crowded, humid corridors and the press of people around the court form the setting for her continued professional presence. Padua greeted her with concern about whether she would be able to attend; she acknowledged her advanced pregnancy with a hand on her belly, but the scene shows her still participating in the work surrounding the case.

Her recollection of Medina links the pregnancy’s timeline to the investigation. Nine months earlier, during the inquiries into the Basajaun case, she had questioned him and remembered him as frightened and tearful while confessing to his crimes. She regards him as someone who would have been terrified of joining the general prison population after sentencing, making suicide in custody seem consistent with his circumstances. The criminal case is not itself part of the pregnancy, but its chronology marks how much has changed since she became pregnant.

Bodily Change and Daily Life

In the final weeks, physical symptoms interrupt Amaia’s routine with sudden force. Walking through Taconera Park after leaving the courthouse, she experiences a strong contraction that makes her stop and lean on her umbrella. The pain spreads through her lower abdomen and into her inner thighs, where it produces a cramp; she is startled by its intensity. The wave passes quickly. Later, another contraction lasts longer but is less painful. She checks the time and realizes twenty minutes have passed since the previous one.

The contractions affect what she can do, but the evidence does not describe them as the start of labor. At lunch, she orders fish and scarcely touches it; resting, she notices that the contractions become less frequent and less intense. Her body is thus presented through close practical adjustments—stopping, leaning, checking the interval, resting—rather than as an abstract condition. Pregnancy enters ordinary movement and eating, changing the terms on which she can continue her day.

At home, physical fatigue compounds the strain of accommodating James’s parents, who have been staying with them for two weeks. Amaia had agreed to the arrangement partly for James’s sake and partly because she lacked the energy to argue with Clarice. She recognizes her unusual patience as a departure from her character. The energy she had enjoyed earlier in pregnancy has faded, leaving her with an unfamiliar lethargy; Clarice’s forceful presence makes that depletion more apparent.

Preparing for the Baby

Amaia’s hesitation is visible in the objects she does and does not choose. Since becoming pregnant, she has bought only a few items for the baby: booties, shirts, leggings, and some neutral-colored pajamas. She can recognize the beauty of dresses and jackets decorated with bows and flowers, and can see why they might suit a little girl, yet holding them brings on a strong rejection of what she experiences as fussiness. Clarice, by contrast, responds enthusiastically to the clothes and their matching shoes. Amaia sometimes wishes she could share that excitement, even as her mother-in-law’s excessive first-time-grandmother purchases make her feel ill.

The same reluctance appears in the question of the baby’s name. Amaia seems unwilling to think about choosing one, and James points out that a name is necessary if they are to refer to their daughter. Amaia knows the concern is reasonable; the difficulty is not simply a disagreement with James, but part of a broader inability to make the expected child feel fully concrete. She had read about this problem and eventually asked her aunt Engrasi for advice.

Engrasi explains that first-time parents commonly struggle to connect bodily changes with the reality of a baby, and that this can affect fathers as well as mothers. She contrasts contemporary access to ultrasound images and the fetal heartbeat with earlier generations, when some parents did not fully grasp that they had a child until they could hold and see the newborn. Her point reframes Amaia’s uncertainty as a recognizable experience rather than proof that she is unprepared or does not care. She also stresses that no one is truly ready for everything parenthood entails, however confidently some people may appear to be.

Happiness, Fear, and Motherhood

Amaia’s ambivalence is sharpened by the gap between what she believes she ought to feel and what she actually feels. She had wanted to become a mother since childhood, when she imagined herself as a real mother in contrast to the darkness and unhappiness of her own early life. That desire took shape more fully after she met James. When motherhood seemed as though it might not happen, she became so anxious that she considered fertility treatment. The pregnancy she eventually achieved therefore answers a profound longing, but does not erase the history that made the longing urgent.

For a time, she had felt fulfilled, happy, and secure in a way she had not experienced for years. In the final weeks, however, old fears return through her dreams. They are familiar fears, associated with words she knows but does not want to recognize. The text does not resolve them into a simple rejection of the baby: Amaia believes she is happy, or that she ought to be, and that uncertainty itself confuses her. Her desired motherhood and her fear of repeating the pain of her own past occupy the same emotional space.

The pregnancy is consequently neither an uncomplicated fulfillment nor a condition that can be explained away by normal first-time-parent anxiety. Engrasi offers reassurance about the difficulty of imagining an unseen child, while Amaia’s returning dreams point toward a more personal source of dread. Her pregnancy brings these strands together: a wanted daughter, a body nearing its limit, domestic pressures she has little energy to resist, and a childhood wound whose presence becomes harder to ignore as motherhood approaches.