‘They brought ice cream and sparklers and stuff, and the waiter sang for her,’ Anton said, and his heart ached. Two hours ago they had sat in the restaurant, happy and satisfied. Júlía had gazed at Anton as she did sometimes, with a tenderness in those brown eyes that made him feel there could be nobody happier than he was.

‘Hey, what’s the matter?’

His father turned down the TV and turned to Anton.

‘Nothing,’ Anton said, yet wanted his father to keep asking, because there was so much that had gone wrong.

‘I can see something’s up,’ his father said. ‘Spill the beans, young man.’

‘Umm.’

He didn’t know what he could tell his father without saying too much.

‘What happened, my boy?’

Now his father had switched to the gentle voice, and Anton felt himself give way. The tears forced their way out and he buried his face in his hands.

‘We split up,’ he gasped.

His father stared at him in amazement.

‘What? And tonight of all nights? My poor lad.’ His father shifted closer, put an arm around Anton’s shoulder and pulled him close. ‘There, there, my boy,’ he crooned, patting his back as if he were a small child who needed to be burped. ‘There, there.’

Gradually his words and the patted rhythm on his back drew him in. It had been years since he had grown out of curling up in his father’s arms, but this time he let himself lie against his shoulder, in the security of his bulky body, while the ten o’clock news bulletin, devoted solely to the explosion, rolled across the screen.

104

‘It’s all wrecked. All the information I had gathered, everything I had written, all the links and the screenshots and everything I had ready for you has been blown up. Not that any of it fucking matters.’

María knew that she was still sedated because she felt like she was floating on a white cloud, although she could see clearly enough that it was a hospital bed she was lying in. But her feeling was correct: she didn’t care about all that stuff, all the missed opportunities and ideas of some kind of justice. She was just relieved to be alive – relieved that she was going to be fine.

‘We have the timeline of events that you let us have, and to be honest, the explosion doesn’t do the story any harm.’ The guy from the Spotlight team, whose name María couldn’t remember, seemed keener than ever. ‘Even though important documents have been lost, some of that can be retrieved and as this is linked to the explosion, we’d be guaranteed record viewing figures. Everyone wants to know about it.’