Daniel discovers clues about Penelope in Fortuny's old home, where a concealed key, a garden photograph, and a long-preserved letter connect the abandoned rooms to Julian and Penelope's past. The discovery changes the meaning of the house's locked spaces: what first seems like a repository of neglect becomes a broken archive of affection, separation, and information kept from Julian.

The abandoned home and its locked room

The home announces its history through neglect. When Daniel pushes open the front door, he finds a dark corridor, dust and grime, broken tiles, and footprints leading into the apartment. The prints matter because they disturb the impression that the house has simply been left to decay: someone has entered recently. Following them, Daniel reaches a locked room, while the caretaker, increasingly uneasy, urges him to leave.

In an unlocked bedroom, amid ordinary remnants of a former life, Daniel finds a carved wooden music box on the bedside table. Its mechanism will not play properly at first. When he lifts the cover, a gold key is lodged inside; removing it allows the music to resume. Daniel recognizes the tune by Ravel and realizes that the key may open the room the caretaker has warned him not to disturb. A household object thus serves both as concealment and as a practical route into the house's central secret.

A room organized around absence

The key opens a room whose window looks onto the yard. Yellowed newspaper blocks the light, and Daniel tears it away to see inside. Crucifixes fill the room: suspended from strings, fixed to the walls, and marked across furniture, tiles, and mirrors. The footprints continue around a bare bed reduced to wires and worm-eaten wood. The room is not merely disused; its dense religious imagery and stripped furnishings make it a place shaped by anxiety and absence.

A roll-top desk beneath the window offers a more tangible record. Its drawers have been forced open and are empty, while the joins show that the desk has been opened recently. Yet Daniel finds notebooks inside. Their pages mix drawings, isolated words, mathematical exercises, quotations, and unfinished poems. Repeated sketches include a man made of flames, a figure that might be an angel or a reptile coiled around a cross, and a vast, fantastical house. These fragments reveal Julian Carax's youthful drawing and writing, but do not explain the room or restore what its emptied drawers once contained.

The photograph and the name on its back

A photograph slips from the final notebook as Daniel is about to return it. He recognizes the girl from another picture: here she is posed in a luxurious garden, with the house Daniel has seen in Carax's sketches visible beyond the treetops. He identifies it as The White Friar, on Avenida del Tibidabo. On the reverse, the short inscription reads, “Penelope, who loves you.” The photograph joins a face, a place, and a declaration of love in one object, giving Daniel direct evidence of Penelope's connection to Carax and the house that appears in his drawings.

Daniel pockets the photograph and asks the caretaker about a letter that arrived after Julian left for Paris. She admits that, rather than throwing it away as Julian's father had instructed, she kept it in the entrance-hall cabinet in case the Frenchwoman returned. The envelope remains among stopped watches, buttons, and obsolete coins: another private document preserved among the house's discarded remnants. Daniel takes it away and reads it later that night.

Penelope's letter and the withheld message

The envelope is addressed to Julian Carax and bears an October 1919 postmark. Its return address identifies Penelope Aldaya at Avenida del Tibidabo, 32, Barcelona. The old letter is written in blue ink on ochre paper and signed by Penelope. Its survival gives Daniel access to a voice that the locked room and the photograph alone could not supply.

Penelope writes that she learned through Jorge that Julian had left Barcelona to pursue his dreams. She had hoped to see him once more, but says that events did not unfold as they had planned. She expects Julian to think she failed to keep her promise and lacked courage. She also recalls trying to reach him through Miquel, only to be told that Julian wanted nothing more to do with her. Her questions about what Julian was told expose the gap between their beliefs: she imagines him leaving convinced she had betrayed him, while she insists that she loved him and wishes him happiness. The letter does not resolve every circumstance behind their separation, but it makes clear that Julian's departure was followed by a serious misunderstanding and that Penelope's attempt to communicate did not reach him.

Evidence preserved against erasure

The clues form a chain of custody as important as their contents. The photograph lies among Carax's notebooks; the key is hidden inside a music box; the letter survives because the caretaker disobeys the order to discard it. Each object has been preserved in a different place, and each supplies what another lacks: the key gives access, the photograph connects Penelope to The White Friar, and the letter records her account of the separation. Daniel's discovery turns scattered keepsakes into a partial history, while the recently disturbed dust and forced desk drawers suggest that the house's past has not remained untouched.

The episode also makes the recovery of truth depend on private preservation rather than an official record. Later evidence about Carax's reported death demonstrates the danger of trusting documents at face value: the morgue's records identify a body through a passport and book, while a policeman threatens an employee who questions the identification and signs the registration himself. Against that manipulated public record, the photograph and letter offer intimate, incomplete testimony. Daniel's discovery does not make the past whole, but it gives him evidence with which to challenge the story that Julian and Penelope had simply chosen to abandon one another.