Ros and Flora’s sisterly relationship

Ros and Flora Salazar’s sisterly relationship is marked by competition, territorial friction, and a growing uncertainty about what one sister is doing behind the other’s back. At the bakery, Ros’s hard-won success and Flora’s casual disregard for her space turn family familiarity into an argument over whose work, objects, and authority belong there. Later, Ros finds Flora in the closed workplace at night and catches her in a lie. The discovery does not resolve what Flora was doing, but it changes the sisters’ conflict from open irritation into suspicion.

The Bakery as a Place of Rivalry

When Amaia Salazar asks how long Flora will stay, Flora says that her television-program filming keeps her busy, though she plans to take a few days off given the circumstances. As she speaks, she rearranges the desk. Ros presses her lips together, a reaction Flora notices; Flora then says, apparently distracted, that she may extend her stay. She pushes a wastepaper bin beside the desk and drops in colored sticky notes, a flower-decorated pen cup, and several pom-pom pens that unmistakably belong to Ros. Her gesture turns the ordinary act of tidying into an intrusion into her sister’s working space.

Amaia answers by replacing Ros’s things on the desk. She reminds Flora that Ros has work to do, including a contract with French supermarkets that Flora had tried and failed to secure, and says that Flora should warn Ros before coming to the bakery if she intends to visit. The rebuke makes the sisters’ professional rivalry explicit: Ros’s business success is not abstract but embodied in a contract Flora did not win. Flora responds with a bitter reference to the supermarket chain, while Amaia answers in French with a smile that treats the exchange as amusing. Flora’s humiliation is visible, but she does not give up. In this scene, the bakery is both Ros’s workplace and the ground on which the sisters measure their differing claims to competence and control.

A Sister Found After Closing

Later, Ros goes to the bakery after closing, as she sometimes does when the day’s work is over and she wants to sit alone in the office. The lights surprise her: she first suspects that Ernesto, the manager, forgot to turn them off. When she opens the storeroom and sees that the office is lit too, she takes out her phone, enters the emergency number, and calls out that she has contacted the police. She hears objects move, followed by a bump and a brush of sound, and presses the call button before Flora answers.

Ros cuts off the call and goes toward the office, asking what Flora is doing there. Flora hesitates and says she thought she had forgotten something and came back for it. When Ros asks what, Flora looks around nervously and claims she came for her purse. Ros points out that it is not there. Flora says she can see that and leaves through the storeroom door. The excuse is small, but its timing makes it consequential: Flora has been found in a closed workplace at night, cannot identify what she came to retrieve, and departs without the purse she claimed to seek. Ros hears the door close behind her and returns her attention to the office, convinced that Flora had been doing something she did not want to admit.

The Painting and the Safe

Rather than follow Flora or accept her explanation, Ros studies the office. She pulls the swivel chair into the middle of the room, sits down, and smokes the joint she had brought with her. As the chair turns and she looks around, the familiar objects begin to suggest a sequence of events. Nearly an hour and several slow rotations later, she notices the market scene in a painting she has often admired for its calm. What catches her now is not the scene itself but a mark on the sofa beneath it: the heel print left by Flora’s shoes.

Ros stands on the same spot and lifts the frame. Behind it is a wall safe that she already knew about. Flora had arranged for it to be installed years earlier, supposedly so she could keep cash on hand for suppliers. Ros believes it should be empty, since payments are now made through bank accounts, but she does not test the combination. The heel mark, the sofa’s position, and the concealed safe lead her to infer that Flora had climbed up to the painting and examined what lay behind it. The evidence points to access, not to what Flora wanted or whether anything was taken; Ros has no confirmed answer.

Suspicion Without Resolution

Ros puts the painting back and returns to the swivel chair. For hours, she watches the safe and turns over the questions raised by Flora’s late-night visit. That prolonged uncertainty matters to their relationship: Ros has moved from being irritated by Flora’s interference with the desk to reading the arrangement of objects as evidence and weighing the gap between Flora’s story and what she may have done. The safe had been installed by Flora under a practical explanation, yet its concealment now gives that shared workplace a private and troubling dimension.

The sisters’ conflict therefore develops through two contrasting encounters. In daylight, Ros’s success is asserted openly and Flora’s resentment is visible; at night, Flora’s purpose remains hidden, and Ros is left to reconstruct her movements from a lie and a heel print. The episode does not establish Flora’s motive or settle the sisters’ dispute. Instead, it leaves Ros with a concrete reason to distrust the explanation Flora offered—and with a safe that raises more questions than it answers.