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her son, or with those cheap rings tarnished by bleach, but Sara was sure that Andrés’s interest in Madrid, the way he begged her again and again to tell him what the streets, the houses, the soccer fields were like, sprang from a desire to escape, to blend his tracks with thousands of others, though perhaps his mother’s social life pained him less than the absence of his father, who rushed into the nearest bar to avoid him if he saw him in the street. Sara could do nothing for the difficult boy other than to love him cautiously and pay attention to him, encouraging him to keep going, always keep going.
     
    It was through Andrés that Sara finally got to know the Olmedo family. As the dying days of August stole light from the evenings, and the car parks began to empty, the boy, who had continued to go to the beach with Sara every morning, even after his mother started working for the new neighbors, suddenly announced that he was fed up with salt, sand, and having to walk back at lunchtime, and anyway his lilo had a puncture, so he’d much rather stay by the pool.“You can carry on going to the beach, if you like,” he added, and Sara found his equivocal remark so amusing—both possessive and tolerant—that she decided to go with him to the pool, although now it was she who trailed him, and not the other way round. So the two of them got used to seeing Tamara, who usually arrived at the pool around mid-morning, almost always on her own, with her towel, her bikini-clad Barbie, and a fabulous water pistol the size of a machine gun, with two water tanks and three cannons on different levels that Andrés coveted from the moment he saw it. Sara told him he should ask the girl if he could have a go, and after they’d had their first water battle,Tamara began laying her towel next to Andrés’s every morning. But the little girl, who was almost unbearably pretty, didn’t much like talking about herself, or her home, or her family, and she hardly ever asked Sara to explain when she didn’t understand something Andrés, her future schoolmate, said, as he spoke very fast and with a strong Andalusian accent. Her Uncle Juan, who sometimes came to fetch her and have a quick swim before lunch, confirmed the different impressions that Sara and Maribel had formed on seeing him for the first time. An attractive but serious man, extremely polite but distant, calm but with an anxious expression, mysterious yet ordinary at the same time, deliberately restrained yet seductive almost despite himself, tall, dark and slim, looking much younger than his forty years, there really was no reason why he should stand out, but for some reason he did.
     
    And yet, as September wore on, Sara began to see the Olmedos in a different light, possibly suspecting that they all—both she and her neighbors—were destined to live side by side like the only survivors of a shipwreck, tossed onto the beach of a desert island by a capricious sea.The development, which only a few weeks earlier had been full of children, pregnant women, tanned pensioners, and fathers in shorts, suddenly turned into a model of itself, like a giant film set with fake houses, their shutters firmly closed, their gardens deserted, this picture of abandonment seemingly confirmed by the few disorientated people remaining, their presence compounding the worrying thickness of the air instead of dispelling it. The startling arrival of the west wind, bringing autumn to what should have been a peaceful summer afternoon, crashed against the dozen or so remaining parasols like a sudden full stop.
     

     
    Juan Olmedo enjoyed his work, and although he was always affected by the general mood of despondency that hung over the last few days of the holidays, he usually got back into his daily routine of white coat and broken bones without too much trouble.That year, however, the first of September felt ominous, like the tremulous first tile in a spiral of dominoes that could send everything