Yáñez’s admission that he had an unnamed, unbaptized daughter who died only hours after birth turns a private family loss into evidence of the secret group’s sacrificial practice. Amaia Salazar confronts him with the possibility that his wife rejected their later son because he replaced the daughter she had lost; Yáñez’s eventual disclosure, followed by Amaia’s accusation, connects the child’s death to the group’s belief that a sacrifice must be carried forward.

The confrontation and the denial

Amaia raises the subject while visiting Yáñez at home. She recalls that another police officer had already spoken to him, then challenges his account of his wife’s condition: in Amaia’s view, the woman had been unwell before their son’s birth, and the baby’s arrival devastated her because she could not love a child who had taken the place of the daughter she had lost. Yáñez does not answer at first. Instead, he picks up the television remote and switches off the screen, a small act that marks the gravity of what Amaia has put before him.

He initially denies having had a daughter. Amaia counters that the earlier officer suspected otherwise and had come to question him about it. After a pause, Yáñez gives the child’s history: she had no name, had not been baptized, and died of crib death a few hours after she was born. The admission establishes the daughter’s existence and her brief life, but it does not itself provide a detailed account of what happened to her. Amaia’s immediate response is to accuse Yáñez of killing his own child, making explicit the conclusion she draws from the disclosure and the surrounding investigation.

The group’s sacrificial rules

The revelation takes on its wider significance against the group’s ritual doctrine. In a separate account of its practices, a former participant explains that the intended victim had to be a girl younger than two and unbaptized. The group treated baptism as an offering and commitment to another god, and therefore incompatible with its own intended offering. Its rationale for the age limit was that a young child’s soul remained in transition: children under two were considered especially suitable as intermediaries between worlds, before the emergence of language marked a changed relation to their surroundings.

The same account describes sacrifice to Inguma as involving deprivation of air and the subsequent surrender of the child’s body as an offering. The group’s victims were to be drawn from the same sex and age group and killed under identical circumstances until a cycle was complete. These rules supply the pattern against which Amaia reads Yáñez’s confession. His daughter’s age and unbaptized status match two of the group’s stated conditions; the evidence presented in the confrontation does not independently establish every detail of her death or the handling of her body.

Grief, guilt, and resignation

Yáñez’s disclosure is followed by a bitter account of what remains of his life. His son is dead, his wife is dead, and he describes himself as wasting away alone in the house. He says that after his wife died, money, the house, and the family businesses ceased to matter to him. He presents himself as someone who has already renounced the life he once valued, and treats the possibility of punishment as largely irrelevant.

His resignation is not the same as a denial of the group’s reach. Yáñez refers to the possibility that members might send him walnuts, a threat associated elsewhere in the investigation with the group, and says he would swallow them and let evil enter his body. The image joins his fatalism to the group’s continuing power: even after claiming to have renounced everything, he speaks as though its threat can still reach him. His account also deepens the distinction between the ritual’s formal logic and its human cost. The group may describe a child as an offering within a cycle; the surviving family is left with bereavement, estrangement, and guilt that such explanations do not undo.

The son as successor and the meaning of the admission

Amaia refuses to let Yáñez’s resignation close the matter. Remembering a witness hidden in an Opus Dei house, she applies the group’s rule that no one leaves without the group collecting its debt. She tells Yáñez that he may have renounced the group, but his son took up the role after him, and that a sacrifice of this kind could not simply be wasted. Her words connect the daughter’s death to a continuing obligation rather than treating it as an isolated tragedy. Yáñez responds by turning the television back on; as Amaia reaches the middle of the hallway, he calls after her, but the available scene does not disclose what he says next.

The admission therefore changes the meaning of the family’s history without making grief disappear. The daughter’s unrecorded, unbaptized life helps explain why Amaia sees Yáñez’s family as entangled in the group’s sacrificial system, while his later reference to his son suggests that the consequences continued into another generation. The scene also sets two forms of explanation against each other: the group’s rules make death appear organized and repeatable, whereas Yáñez’s losses and his wife’s suffering expose the devastation those rules leave behind.