Johanna joins her father in the garden. Without a word, she opens the bag, takes out a blouse and throws it into the fire.

“What are you doing?” Manuel protests.

But Jo responds with that strange look of hers, and since he doesn’t know what it’s all about, he decides to keep quiet. He watches as she drops the garments among the burning leaves, one by one. After a while, he hands her the spade and she thanks him with a smile before pushing the pair of shoes into the middle of the flames.

“Wait, you’ll see,” he says with boyish enthusiasm, and goes to fetch a small can of gasoline from the back of his pick-up truck.

Triumphant, he pours it over the blaze, which explodes and rekindles a dangerously powerful fire. Its flames turn their faces orange and warm them up at the start of this damp, freezing night. The middle of the blaze pops and hisses.

She laughs softly, so her father is quite pleased with his trick. He hasn’t made anybody laugh about anything for a long time. He tries to think of the last time he did but can’t remember; perhaps when he played at being a monster with his daughters and pretended to slide into the cement mixer as if it was an ogre’s pantry. They would have been six and seven at most. He can’t recall anything past that. In any case, it’s been a while since he’s also laughed, and now it doesn’t feel like he’s about to any time soon. Besides, he doesn’t really want to.

Manuel is relieved to see the remnants of the armchair disappear at the same time as the pretty blouses he knows nothing about. She hasn’t asked him any questions, so he respects her silence.

After a little while, the bag is empty, or almost. Jo crouches by the fire, grabs a few books with fine covers, brings them close to the fire, then moves away. She puts them back in the bag. “Spoils of war,” she mutters to herself.

Crying rings out upstairs, a sign that the baby is awake and that Céline is going to start an exhausted to-ing and fro-ing down the corridor to get her back to sleep, trying to do the right thing, alternating gentleness and panic, angry shouting and nursery rhymes. Jo has trouble doing her schoolwork when the baby cries, and when her mother and her sister start screaming at each other over the child’s wailing, but she never complains; she knows the time will come when she leaves.

She’s waiting.

Manuel’s phone suddenly rings, an incongruous tune playing over the crackling of the fire.