Zarautz is the seaside setting for Amaia Salazar’s visit to Flora, a journey that brings family history and a murder investigation into the same room. Its winter coast offers beauty, light, and conspicuous wealth; against that inviting surface, Amaia weighs the pull of her childhood dream against the increasingly powerful call of Elizondo and the dead she feels bound to answer.

Setting and Character

Amaia remembers Zarautz as the place where she wanted to live as a child. The town’s appeal is rendered through specific contrasts: a tree-lined avenue, elegant houses facing the sea, an old quarter of shops and bars, and people still out on the streets in the rain. The air carries the scent of the wild sea, while the light over the water seems wholly different from the light in a valley enclosed by mountains. Zarautz represents a childhood ideal of coastal life, distinct from the landscape in which Amaia was born.

On the winter morning of her visit, that ideal remains vivid. White clouds hang over a sea that is not quite blue; waves break in white lines, and surfers carry their boards across the exposed sand at low tide. Two horses trot along the compact shore. From the beachfront buildings, the broad windows promise the pleasure of waking to the Cantabrian Sea. The view is beautiful, but it is also framed by privilege: the real-estate displays make clear that the coast remains an exclusive place for the rich, much as it was when Basque and Madrid entrepreneurs began building grand houses there a century and a half earlier.

The Pull of Home

The visit takes place at a moment when Amaia’s ideas about where she belongs are changing. Until recently, she had been convinced that she did not love her own town and did not want to return to Elizondo. Over the past year, however, those certainties have shifted. She senses the call of the place where she was born, by the bend in the river, and recognizes that she is being drawn back even as she still has the strength to resist.

That attraction is not simply nostalgia. Amaia believes that the dead call to her and that a force compels her to face those who would desecrate the valley. Zarautz gives her a different prospect: an open seafront and the possibility of a life shaped by comfort and distance from the mountain valley. Yet its beauty cannot settle the question for her. As she looks toward the sea, she is less certain than she once was that she wants to remain away from home.

A Visit to Flora

Amaia travels to Zarautz to see Flora and discuss family matters, leaving Jonan Etxaide behind to rest. She decides that this is something she must deal with alone. At Flora’s apartment, a uniformed doorman announces her arrival, and the sea is visible from the entrance through a floor-to-ceiling exterior window, lightly tinted orange. The immense salon and its light impress Amaia; the apartment embodies the kind of luxury for which, she thinks, it is worth paying.

The polished setting does not keep the conversation at a distance from painful family ties. Amaia raises Anne Arbizu, and Flora’s smile falters; when Amaia asks about Anne, a slight tremor in Flora’s jaw betrays her restraint. Flora does not immediately deny having a connection to Anne. Instead, she asks what Amaia wants to know, leaving the visit poised between sisterly conversation and questioning.

The Investigation Enters the Family

Amaia sets out the connections she believes matter: Anne had a relationship with Flora’s brother-in-law, Freddy; Amaia says Anne was the source of Ros’s suffering; and Anne and Flora had been close enough to part with kisses and embraces. She then states that Anne died violently in a river at the hands of Flora’s former husband, Víctor. These are presented as Amaia’s assertions during the confrontation, not as a neutral account detached from her suspicions.

Amaia also challenges Flora’s account of Víctor’s death. Flora had killed the man who had been her husband for twenty years, but Amaia says she does not believe the killing was self-defense. In her view, Víctor was incapable of confronting Flora and would have died before daring to threaten her. Flora presses her jaw shut and looks outside rather than answering. Amaia further argues that Flora’s action was not motivated by concern for the girls Víctor had killed: recalling Flora’s earlier defense of a supposed purifier who punished insolent girls, she suspects that Víctor’s decisive offense was harming Anne. In Zarautz, the elegant sea-facing home becomes the setting for a direct challenge to the version of events Flora has maintained, while the beauty outside remains sharply at odds with the family violence under discussion.