Leandro smiled as he nodded. “Valls’s wife suffered from a chronic illness that prevented her from having children. Valls decided to keep your sister and bring her up as his own child. He called her Mercedes, after his late mother. Stealing what she could, Susana managed to put together enough money to take a train to Madrid. Once she was there, she spent months spying on the playgrounds of all the schools in Madrid, hoping to locate your sister. By then she had built herself a new identity. She lived in a squalid room in the Chueca area and at night worked as a seamstress in a workshop. During the day she searched the Madrid schools. And when she had almost given up hope, she found her. She saw her from a distance, and knew it was her daughter. She began to go there every morning. She would approach the playground railings and try to catch the girl’s attention. She managed to talk to her a couple of times. She didn’t want to frighten her. When she realized that Mercedes . . . that Sonia no longer remembered her, your mother was on the point of taking her own life. But she didn’t give up. She kept going there every morning, hoping to see her, even if it was just for a few seconds, or to speak to her if the child came over to the railings. One day she decided that she should tell her the truth. She was caught by Valls’s bodyguards as she stood by the railings, talking to your sister. They blew her brains out with a single shot in front of the girl. Would you like me to stop for a bit?”

Victoria shook her head.

Leandro continued to narrate what he knew about how Victoria had grown up in the golden prison of El Pinar. In time, Miguel Ángel Ubach was summoned by the Generalissimo to head a group of bankers and dignitaries who had financed his army, and put in charge of designing a new economic structure for the State. Ubach left Barcelona and moved with his family to a large house in Madrid, which Victoria always hated and from which she escaped, disappearing for a few months, until she was found in strange circumstances on a beach in San Feliu de Guíxols, a small town about a hundred kilometers from Barcelona.

“This is one of the big gaps in the story we have put together,” said Leandro. “Nobody knows where you were during those months, or who with. All we know is that one night in 1948, shortly after you returned to Madrid, the Ubach residence went up in flames. It was reduced to ashes, and both the banker and his wife Federica died in the blaze.”

Leandro searched her eyes, but Victoria kept silent.

“I do realize that it’s very difficult and painful to talk about this, but it’s important that we know what happened during those months when you disappeared.”