4 ideas
María Dolz, a Madrid publishing editor, watches a seemingly perfect couple, Miguel Desvern and Luisa, at breakfast each morning until Desvern is stabbed to death by a mentally disturbed parking attendant who wrongly believes Desvern is prostituting his daughters. Confronted, Díaz-Varela offers a second version, that Desvern was terminally ill and wanted a sudden death, and María cannot verify either account. She keeps silent and leaves him.
Once someone dies, the survivors reorganise their lives around the absence, and a returning dead person would become an intolerable intruder rather than a restored loved one. Grief is therefore partly a process of letting the dead be replaced. Mourners rely on the finality of death to move on, and that dependence is what makes a killing survivable for everyone except the victim.
Being infatuated is treated as a state that suspends ordinary moral limits. The infatuated person will wait indefinitely, manipulate circumstances, or remove an obstacle, all while believing they are only enabling the inevitable. Seen this way, a crime of passion need not be impulsive. It can be patient and planned, and justified privately as fate being helped along.
Most of what we know about past events comes from other people's accounts, and when several accounts cannot be checked, we tend to settle on the one we can live with. Knowledge that cannot be acted on, such as proof that a lover arranged a murder, becomes a burden. People therefore often choose not to pursue it and let the plausible story stand in for the truth.