Amaia Discovers That Yáñez's Daughter Was Sacrificed

Amaia Salazar’s confrontation with Yáñez turns a denied family history into a revelation about the sacrifice binding his household to the group. The disclosure is not a straightforward confession: Yáñez initially denies that he ever had a daughter, then admits that an unnamed baby died hours after birth. Amaia interprets the loss as a killing and, in the exchange’s final turn, argues that Yáñez’s son took over the sacrifice his father had abandoned.

The Earlier Visit and the Photograph

The encounter begins with a detail from Amaia Salazar’s previous visit. She reminds Yáñez that another police officer came to see him before her and that he prepared the officer a café con leche. When she asks what they discussed, Yáñez offers little in reply. The earlier visit matters because it establishes that someone else had already approached him about the family’s past; Amaia is not raising the suspicion from nowhere, but following a lead left by that conversation.

Amaia stands and takes from a side table the photograph of Yáñez’s wife that he had shown her during her earlier visit. Holding this image as she speaks, she challenges the explanation that his wife became depressed only after their son was born. Amaia proposes that the woman had been unwell long before, and that the baby’s arrival devastated her because she could not love him: he had come to replace the daughter she had lost. The photograph thus brings the absent wife into a conversation from which she cannot speak, while Amaia uses the family’s visible record to test a concealed history.

Denial and Disclosure

Yáñez’s first reaction is physical as well as verbal. He opens his mouth but says nothing, then picks up the television remote and turns off the set. After Amaia states that the earlier officer suspected he had had a daughter, Yáñez remains silent for several seconds. The sequence moves from evasion to attention: the television is silenced, but the answer does not come at once.

When Amaia asks the daughter’s name, Yáñez takes time before replying. He says the baby had no name and was never baptized, and that she died only a few hours after birth from crib death. The brief account supplies the fact Amaia’s theory depends on—the daughter existed, though Yáñez had just denied it—and also the circumstances he gives for her death. The child’s lack of a name and baptism means the family’s loss is disclosed without any public marker of her identity.

Amaia reacts with disgust and accuses Yáñez of killing his own daughter. The narrative presents that charge as her response to what she has learned, not as an independently described forensic finding or an explicit confession by Yáñez. His reaction leaves the accusation hanging: he looks at her, begins to smile, laughs, and then stops abruptly. The movement from silence to laughter unsettles the exchange without resolving, in his own words, exactly what happened to the baby.

Grief, Renunciation, and the Group’s Debt

Yáñez answers Amaia’s accusation by asking whether she intends to report him. He frames any punishment against the losses and isolation that already define his life: his son and wife are dead, and he expects to spend the rest of his life wasting away in the house. He says that money, the house, and his businesses stopped mattering after his wife died, and that he had renounced them. This account does not retract Amaia’s accusation; instead, it places his apparent indifference beside a past in which he had possessed wealth and things he considered important.

He also describes a threat associated with the group: if they send him walnuts, he says, he will swallow them and let evil work its way through his insides. The walnuts make the group’s continuing power concrete even as Yáñez claims to have given up. Amaia recalls the hidden witness at the Opus Dei house and the witness’s statement that nobody leaves the group. Against that rule, Yáñez’s renunciation appears less like a clean escape than a broken link in an obligation that can pass to someone else.

The Son’s Succession

Amaia makes that implication explicit as she leaves. She tells Yáñez that he may have renounced the group, but his son took over from him, and that such a sacrifice could not simply be wasted. The remark connects the daughter’s death, the family’s later loss, and the group’s demand for sacrifice without supplying a fuller account of the son’s role in this particular exchange. Its force lies in the succession it identifies: abandoning the obligation did not necessarily end it.

Yáñez picks up the remote and turns the television back on after Amaia says this. The return to the screen follows the disclosure, the accusation, and her final challenge; it closes the encounter with a gesture rather than an answer. The event therefore reveals both a hidden daughter and the persistence of the group’s claim across generations, while leaving the precise circumstances of the baby’s death unresolved in Yáñez’s own account.