Back in the car, Teresa found it hard to tear her gaze away from the Valent family home; she kept her eyes on the outline of the house until it disappeared from sight. The pointed roof turning opaque in the sunlight, the dark windows, the shadows she pictured moving behind the glass . . . there was a sense of expectation, as if the house were waiting for something to come and repair the lives of its inhabitants.

She thought of the youngest of them all, the little trooper with dirty fingernails. She was sure he was doing the same right now, staring after her as she was leaving. Diego was a curious, spirited boy, with a spark his parents had sought to stifle with senseless prohibitions and empty tests—all those sweets displayed in full view but kept beyond reach.

He was used to being surrounded by the objects of his desires every day without ever being able to reach out and touch them. Could there be anything more detrimental to a child’s psychology than that?

Yes. A mother as cold as marble.

Teresa wondered whether the father had been emotionally reticent toward his son as well. She was inclined to think he must have been, given what Marta Valent had revealed: she’d described her husband as “strict,” she’d even unwittingly called him “distant.”

Distant enough that he might have been considered pathologically unemotional?

She told herself it was none of her business, but then quickly dismissed her own reservations; as far as she was concerned children were everyone’s collective responsibility.

She looked for a sweet in her pocket and was astonished to realize that the licorice had disappeared.

After a moment’s bewilderment, she started laughing.

She’d underestimated him. The Valent boy knew how to survive.

-10-

-10-

The days were getting shorter. Lucia noticed it because she spent so many afternoons shut in her room. Once she’d finished singing all the nursery rhymes she knew, the only interesting thing left to do was to look outside her window at the woods beyond the lawn.

She knew every single branch and the shapes of their shadows on the grass. She would watch them grow longer by the hour and inch closer to the house every day.

She knew why it happened: it had to do with the way the earth whirled around the sun. Even though she didn’t always understand everything, she paid attention to the teacher’s lessons in school and used her imagination to fill in the gaps. Lucia was aware that she wasn’t as clever as the other kids, but she knew how those shadows moved and that they were due to get shorter again soon. She had always been entranced by the eternal battle between light and dark, but these days her fascination was mixed with the more pressing need to see the end of the winter (though it had barely begun), and with it the end of these premature evenings.