“Am I correct up to now?” asked Leandro.

Victoria nodded, drying her angry tears.

That very night those men separated them, and she never saw Sonia again. They told her that if she didn’t want her little sister to be killed, she must forget her parents, because they were a pair of criminals. And from then on, they said, her name would no longer be Ariadna Mataix but Victoria Ubach. They explained to her that her new parents were Miguel Ángel Ubach and his wife Federica, and that she was very lucky. She would live with them in the most beautiful house in all of Barcelona, a mansion called El Pinar. She would have servants at her disposal, and whatever she wished for would be hers. Ariadna was ten.

“From then on the story becomes confused,” warned Leandro.

They discovered, he explained, that Víctor Mataix had been shot in Montjuïc Castle, like so many others, on the orders of Mauricio Valls, the prison governor, although the official report said he had committed suicide. Leandro believed that Valls had sold Ariadna to the Ubachs in exchange for favors that would help him rise in the regime, together with a bundle of shares in a bank that had been recently set up. These shares had been expropriated from estates of hundreds of people who were imprisoned and in many cases executed shortly after the end of the war.

“Do you know what happened to your mother?”

Victoria nodded, pressing her lips together.

Leandro told her how, as far as they knew, the day after her husband and daughters had been kidnapped, her mother, Susana, managed to gather her strength and made the mistake of going to the police to report what had happened. She was immediately arrested and interned in a psychiatric hospital in Horta, where she was kept in solitary confinement and underwent electric shock treatments for five years, until they decided to abandon her in some deserted area on the outskirts of Barcelona, once they realized she couldn’t even remember her name.

“Or at least that’s what they believed.”

Leandro explained that Susana had survived on the streets of Barcelona by begging, sleeping rough, and eating food she stole from rubbish bins, hoping that one day she would be able to recover her daughters. That hope is what kept her alive. Years later, Susana found a newspaper among the rubble in an alleyway of the Raval quarter, with a photograph of Mauricio Valls and his family. By then he was a very important man who had left his days as prison governor behind him. In the photograph Valls posed with a little girl, Mercedes.

“Mercedes was none other than your little sister, Sonia. Your mother recognized her because Sonia had been born with a mark she could never forget.”

“A mark in the shape of a star on the base of her neck,” Victoria heard herself saying.