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unlike a few months before, she was able to smile. She could even picture him cooking dinner with that radiologist who was obsessed with the gym and the hairdresser’s; he who had never done the dishes and had never opened a kitchen drawer except to take out a corkscrew. The last time she’d seen him it looked as though he had dyed the grey hairs on his temples and sideburns. She also imagined him belly dancing for the radiologist, and chasing her around a coffee table, in one of the wild cat-and-mouse games that he hadn’t played with her for years. Her feelings for Alberto had changed from sadness to irony, and from irony to sarcasm. She would never have imagined that someone who had been such an important part of her life since her youth would become, in barely ten months, a sort of rag doll, an empty, fake being – a veritable bastard. She found it hard to remember what he looked like when they’d met, at the time when he drove around Barcelona in that white, impeccable, polished, perfect Mercedes of his, it was just like him. A doctor from a family of doctors, a young cardiologist with a brilliant career, he’d been seductive, intelligent, handsome. Now, Doctor Cambra could not rid her mind of the image of her husband of twenty years chasing the young radiologist. When she bumped into Doctor Carnero, the anaesthetist on duty, she was still wearing a sarcastic smile on her face. They looked at each other in complicity.
    ‘This is the first time I’ve seen anyone smile on a New Year’s Eve shift,’ said the anaesthetist as she walked by.
    ‘I guess there’s a first time for everything.’
    A voice called Doctor Cambra through the loudspeakers. Before the message was over, she was at her station.
    ‘In number four there’s a young woman with fractured limbs. A motorcycle accident.’
    Doctor Cambra’s blood boiled. Her face flushed and her heartbeat accelerated. She walked over to the room they’d indicated, to find a very pale young woman being tended to by a nurse and an assistant. The girl looked scared and helpless, and the doctor immediately felt her legs grow weak. She tried to regain her composure, and said, in an annoyed tone:
    ‘Who took her helmet off?’
    ‘They brought her in without one. She probably wasn’t wearing it.’
    The doctor lifted the girl’s eyelids and shone a little torch in them. She couldn’t help taking her hand and squeezing it. The girl’s other hand looked dead and was scratched all over. The doctor pressed gently on her thorax, spleen, kidneys, and stomach, saying: ‘Does this hurt? And here?’ The girl moaned, but shook her head.
    ‘Let’s see. Tell me how it happened.’
    The girl mumbled something, but she couldn’t string her sentences together.
    ‘Do you feel a bit sleepy?’ asked the doctor. ‘Don’t fall asleep now. Go on, tell me what you can remember.’
    As the girl tried to make herself understood, the nurse took her blood pleasure.
    ‘We’re going to need a CAT scan.’
    The assistant wrote it down. The girl went on talking, now more coherently.
    ‘Blood pressure’s eleven-eighteen.’
    ‘How old are you?’ asked the doctor.
    ‘Nineteen. I have to be home for dinner.’
    Doctor Cambra held her breath and looked away. That may have been the same thing her daughter had said six monthsbefore, when a doctor at the casualty ward had asked her what she had just asked the unknown girl. Nineteen. Her daughter had turned nineteen in March. As they took the girl away for her scan, Doctor Cambra left the room. Her daughter’s death would not come between her and her work, but she could not forget it either. Just like this girl, she’d been nineteen, and was riding her moped with her helmet hanging from her arm, heading home for dinner with her mother. However, it had been her father who got the call. At the hospital, Alberto’s name was well-known. They didn’t even have to look up his number in the dead girl’s diary. It was on file, at reception,