But it was the solitary figure in the front pew – hunched and tiny in black – that stilled the blood in Nene’s veins. Santi’s mother, Renata. She was as still as the statues all about, as frozen behind her mask of grief as the gilded figures at the altar. Nene had only met her three times – once at the Feria Goyesca bullfighting festival; once in corking season when she had come up to La Ventilla with refreshments; and once when Nene and Santi had walked too far one afternoon and she had set up a small search party. Nene remembered her as a vivacious woman: Santi had inherited his infectious smile from her and the gap between his teeth. Her skin was too tanned (her mother would have said), her face too thin, but she had been a beautiful woman once; Nene had understood that even as a small girl and many times she had wished she could have known her better. But politics, class . . . the adult world, had made it impossible. She wasn’t supposed to ‘consort’ with those people, as her mother put it. It was unseemly for her to run about the fields like a campesino, to come in with muddy hands and scraped knees, to laugh with the labourers as though they were her equals, to call them her friends. Her best friend.

Santi.

Shame bled through her, staining her cheeks, and she wrung her hands as she thought yet again about what he must have thought, how he must have felt, when he’d heard his father had been murdered. By her family. It was her torture, to imagine his face . . .

A note sounded, pure and steady, as though an angel was floating through the mihrab, towards the east window and heaven itself. Everyone turned and stood as one, as the singer – a girl not much older than her – came through, her voice expanding into the billowing space as she sang ‘Ave Maria’. Behind her, coming at an almost ceremonial half-step, the coffin inched into view and Nene felt a gripping tightness at her chest as she saw the pall-bearers come in, their shoulders sagging beneath the weight.

At the very front was Santi. For a moment, she did not recognize him. He had grown so tall and strong, his skin darker than she had ever seen it; his shaggy hair of their childhood cropped short, revealing those beautiful bones of a face she had loved and missed these four years. But he was different in other ways too – he was a man now. The shadow of stubble prickled his cheeks and jawline, there was a scar on his neck that hadn’t been there before, and where once his eyes had danced and laughed, now they blazed, fixed upon the altar as though there were answers there to his questions.

She watched the coffin slide by, her breath held, unable to believe it was her brothers, her blood, who had put a man inside that box. The girl’s voice began to soar as the coffin was carried to the front and set down on the trestle, the men grunting slightly as they struggled to make the transition respectfully smooth. They took their seats besides their wives, families. Mother.