The threat of being exposed was ever present. Only last month, she had been shopping in the central market and as she left the meat stall, had bumped straight into two young sisters she immediately recognized from home. Their house had been on the same street as the Esperanzas’, and they had played with Santi and his siblings. Marina had never been introduced to them formally but she knew exactly who they were, for she had seen them many times in church as her family passed by to their pews at the front. The sisters had always looked so neat and tidy in their Sunday-best outfits, with their combed hair and placid expressions, but they didn’t fool her with their goody-two- shoes acts, for Santi would gleefully recount to her their swimming games down by the river, their hiding games in the gorge, their running games in the streets . . . Marina had hated them for it, getting to have the best of her best friend, the freedom to play with him while she was sequestered at La Ventilla with just a governess and her brothers. And she hated them still, for now Santi was dead and there was nothing left of him to be had at all.

As she had stood, toe-to- toe, with them in the street, there had been a moment of pure instinct in which they all recognized one another as Andalusian sisters, natives from the same homeland; she could see they recognized her but that they couldn’t pinpoint where exactly. They half smiled, knowing they were kin but not yet realizing the bitter divide between them. Her hair, still roughly cut and short on the neck, was the most effective and immediate deterrent to revealing her identity and in the next instant, she had turned away, hoping the narrative attached to her ‘look’ would be enough to reaffirm their instinct that not only was she one of them, but that she had suffered for their shared principles. They would assume she had been captured. Tortured. Abused.

But she would take no chances – she no longer shopped at that market, nor did she frequent that district now for fear of seeing them again, for if they did subsequently place her, they would effectively be her executioners, of that she had no doubt. It meant she had to walk another two miles across the city to the next market, risking the snipers’ bullets that had dispatched Marta so ruthlessly; it also meant she could no longer shop with her only remaining friend, for she could think of no viable explanation to give Luciana as to why the central market must now be avoided. She had escaped Ronda’s borders but still, it seemed, she was tethered to her past.

Taking the milk off the heat, she walked into the pantry to get a stick of dynamite. As she came back out again, she heard the front door slam and she flinched, freezing on the spot.

‘Relax, it’s just Ivan,’ Luciana murmured, without looking up. If she had noticed Marina’s growing paranoia, she passed no comment on it. ‘I heard his cough.’