Her fixation on the TV and the fact she’d turned the volume up high meant she didn’t hear her mum get in. She didn’t realize she was there until she was stood right in front of her. Lola, elegant and wearing a smile on her face like always, greeted her daughter warmly and thanked her for heating up dinner at a sensible time.

“Is your dad back yet?”

“No, he’s not,” she said, furtively glancing at her mother without taking her eyes off the screen for one moment.

“He must be on his way. We left the office at the same time, but he had a few things he wanted to sort out. He shouldn’t be long. I’ll get dinner ready for us.”

“Make some for Roberto too, he’s not back yet,” said Ana.

Hearing her son was late back again didn’t exactly please Lola; the latest marks he’d brought home hadn’t been as good as normal. As she spoke with Ana from the kitchen, she started cleaning up the plates her dad, Ana’s grandfather, had left on the marble-topped table when he’d had dinner earlier. She lit the gas stove, put a pan on and laid three places at the table. She’d always been able to do several things and talk at the same time. Once she’d finished she went back to the lounge to try and talk with her teenage daughter, entranced as she was by the television.

“Is grandad already in bed?”

“Yeah, he went to bed early. I got home at half six and haven’t seen him.”

“You haven’t seen him? Those plates might still be left over from lunch then. Maybe he hasn’t had dinner. Go up to his room and find out for me.”

Ana let out a sigh, annoyed she had to go upstairs, annoyed at the interruption and annoyed her mother would simply not stop talking. The only saving grace was that it was an ad break so she took another bite from her sandwich and set off to find her grandfather.

He’d been living with them for five years. Three or four months after his wife had died, he’d turned up at their door without any warning and with plans to stay indefinitely after living in Argentina for almost fifty years. He’d spent almost his entire life as an emigrant and had actually spent more time living there than he had here. He came from both places, but was also from neither of them. His accent gave him away; when he was there it sounded like he was from here and when he was here it sounded like he came from there. It was a sunny day when he arrived at the door with a small suitcase, rang the bell and told his daughter Lola he was here to stay. Nobody was expecting it, but nobody asked any questions either. He was coming home perhaps because, in spite of his business and successes over there, he was on his own now. This is where he had his only family, his daughter, his grandchildren and also his home, and he was very welcome, he didn’t need to give any explanations.

Ana rushed to get back before the end of the ads and, as luck would have it, just as she stepped into the corridor she bumped into her brother Roberto who was in even more of a rush than her. She didn’t miss the chance to get him to go and find their grandfather instead.

“You’ve got to go and check on grandad. Mum’s cross with you for being late. She wants to know if he’s had dinner yet or not. Go and ask him.”

Roberto said he’d go. It meant he could delay the moment he had to face his mother for a bit longer; she wasn’t going to be in a good mood with him, that much he knew for free.

Arriving home late and getting bad marks all boiled down to the same thing: Roberto had started going out with a girl a few weeks earlier. He had asked a girl from class, Nuria, out on a date and now they were seeing each other. His exams fell at the exact same time he was walking around in a daze, thinking only about how he would ask Nuria to be his girlfriend. It took him a while to pluck up the courage. It wasn’t an easy thing to say, “Will you go out with me?” His closest friends, those who knew what Roberto was trying to do, thought Nuria was giving enough signs to mean she was interested in him too. They all agreed on that, but Roberto, after thinking about it non-stop hour after hour, sometimes managed to convince himself she definitely liked him back and sometimes exactly the opposite.

Whenever she was close to him, whenever she brushed past him in the chemistry lab where they were paired together because their surnames came next to each other in the alphabet, whenever he caught the scent of her perfume, Roberto felt as though his whole body was on fire. His heart would beat faster, he would feel as though he’d been turned inside out and his body would start shaking. If anyone saw him they’d think he was ill, not in love.

Sometimes he thought that when he finally got to kiss her, which is what he wanted more than anything in the world, he might even faint. Or maybe he wouldn’t know what to do, which would be worse because he’d want to die of shame. But in reality he’d already kissed her. He’d kissed her dozens of times, hundreds of times in his dreams, in his daydreams and as he lay in bed waiting to fall asleep. That’s when he kissed her most often.

Everything he felt he felt to the extreme: fear, love, confusion, nerves, happiness, pain. Nuria was on his mind all day long, from the moment he opened his eyes. She was the first person he thought about and the only thing he thought about. Nuria, Nuria, Nuria. It was as though there wasn’t room in his head for anything else. Nuria filled it all and she appeared everywhere, in maths equations, in chemistry formulas and in English vocabulary lists. Nothing was as interesting as she was.