Flora

Flora, Amaia Salazar’s elder sister, is a guarded and often forceful presence whose private history gradually unsettles the judgments made about her. She resumes a relationship with Fermín Montes, develops a genuine attachment to Ibai, and eventually reveals that Anne Arbizu was her daughter, born when Flora was eighteen and surrendered for adoption. Her story turns on the distance between what her sisters can see and what Flora has concealed: apparent hardness coexists with grief, and suspicion about her motives does not explain the whole of her life.

Identity and Public Life

Flora is a co-owner of the family bakery workshop, where Ros has taken on much of the work and built a strong business. Ros points to a doubling of orders over the previous year, new customers, and returning customers made more satisfied by new recipes and successful adaptations of traditional ones. The increase is tangible in the money Ros deposits into Flora’s account each month, but Flora dismisses that measure as secondary to her claim that the workshop belongs equally to them.

She considers settling again in Elizondo, where she has met a man and says they have a stable relationship. Her national television program, she explains, would not prevent her from returning: she could travel to the studios for one week each month to record its episodes. If Ros will not agree to Flora taking up the workshop’s leadership again, Flora proposes buying Ros’s share. The discussion presents Flora as someone accustomed to asserting her interests directly, but also as a business partner with a concrete plan rather than a merely sentimental wish to return.

Relationships and Conflicting Impressions

Fermín tells Amaia that he and Flora have been together again for several days. Amaia reacts with disbelief, then confronts Flora over Fermín’s past: she accuses her of having nearly destroyed him and reminds her that he was suspended from police work for almost a year because of her. Flora replies that Amaia has no proof about what happened on the night Víctor Oyarzabal died. She acknowledges that she may not have been fully honest with Fermín when they first met, when she was still married, but insists that he knew she was married and that her interest in him is now honest.

Amaia rejects that explanation. She suspects Flora’s relationships are shaped by self-interest and suggests that Fermín is not the real object of her attention: she believes Flora wants access to someone young, blonde, and beautiful. The exchange makes suspicion itself part of their relationship. Amaia interprets Flora through past harm and presumed calculation; Flora responds with fury when Anne is brought into the accusation, insisting that Amaia knows nothing of the relationship she had with her. Her anger does not settle the dispute over her earlier conduct, but it signals that Anne is not, for Flora, an interchangeable object of advantage.

Flora’s feelings for Ibai also complicate Amaia’s mistrust. Amaia initially doubts that her sister could suddenly adore the child and wonders whether kindness is meant to soften her. Their aunt offers a longer view: Flora had wanted children, suffered while trying to have them, and had been asking about Ibai for months. Those calls were not usually made to Amaia; the aunt passed on stories of the child’s development, and Flora seemed to enjoy them. Amaia has also seen Flora look at Ibai and cradle him whenever she has the opportunity, and remembers a beautiful photograph of him displayed prominently in the entrance hall of Flora’s home in Zarautz.

Care for Ibai and the Bakery Dispute

A scene before the fire gives Amaia visible evidence of what the aunt has described. Flora holds Ibai in her arms, smiling as she sings to him and accompanies the song with little bounces. Ibai laughs aloud. Amaia is surprised by Flora’s playful manner and the exaggerated voice she uses with the child; she has seen her sisters drawn to babies, perhaps because they could not have children, but has not previously seen Flora behave this way. The episode does not erase Amaia’s concerns. Instead, it makes her reconsider them against an affectionate gesture she can witness directly.

That tenderness sits alongside a sharper conflict with Ros. When Flora raises the possibility of returning to Elizondo and taking charge of the workshop again, she emphasizes her equal ownership and offers to buy Ros out if they cannot agree. Ros’s account of the thriving business answers the proposal with evidence of her own contribution, while Flora’s insistence makes clear that the dispute concerns authority as well as income. Amaia tries to intervene, but Ros tells her not to involve herself: the argument is between the sisters. Flora’s family life is therefore not a single story of reconciliation; affection, shared history, and competing claims continue to coexist.

Anne Arbizu and the Hidden Past

Flora explains her bond with Anne by revealing that Anne was her daughter. She gave birth at eighteen, during a summer she had told the family she was spending with their aunts in San Sebastián; in fact, she was away having the baby. Anne was not Víctor’s child. Flora says that when she was six months pregnant, before it became difficult to hide the pregnancy, she took her savings to a charitable home run by religious sisters in Pamplona, a place that took in unmarried pregnant women. She remained there until the birth and gave the child up for adoption on the day she was born, believing the promise that Anne would go to a good family.

Nurse Hidalgo was to help with the birth. Flora says she did not meet a group or seek to learn more about any organization; she trusted the nurse, who had promised that the problem would be taken care of. That reassurance troubled her because it recalled the man who had attempted to perform an abortion on her, smiling and promising to resolve her difficulty. She had also heard stories of midwives who failed to tie umbilical cords and let unwanted babies die after birth. Against that fear, adoption seemed to Flora a way of giving the child a better life. After returning home, she resumed her relationship with Víctor and kept the birth unspoken. Her mother never forgave her and made her pay for it.

Flora recognized Anne when rumors spread that the Arbizu family had adopted a girl. She saw the child in a pram and believed she could have recognized her among a million. For years, she watched Anne grow up in another household without daring to look at her for long, lest anyone notice what she felt. Flora describes that proximity as a source of lifelong bitterness and says it kept her tied to the town so she could remain near her daughter.

Recognition and Narrative Significance

The distance between mother and daughter began to change when Anne came to see Flora at the workshop one late afternoon the previous year. Anne already knew who Flora was and who she herself was; she had investigated until she found her. According to Flora, Anne did not reproach her. She wanted to maintain a relationship without hurting the feelings of her elderly adoptive parents, and suggested that they might tell everyone after those parents had died. Anne also gave Flora a photograph of herself as a baby, which Flora points out while recounting the secret. Amaia had mistaken the image for a photograph of Ibai, a small misunderstanding that brings Flora’s concealed motherhood into the room through an ordinary family object.

Flora’s history does not simply vindicate her in every dispute. The evidence leaves Amaia’s accusations about the past unresolved, while confirming that Flora’s concern for Ibai and her attachment to Anne have personal depth. What changes is the scale of what can be understood about her: the sister who seems to calculate every relationship has spent years unable to acknowledge the daughter she loved, and the woman suspected of treating affection as leverage has also endured the consequences of surrendering a child and watching her grow up nearby. Her guardedness remains, but the revelation gives it a history rather than reducing it to a fixed character trait.