4 ideas
In Santiago, Julián, a literature professor who writes on weekends, puts his stepdaughter Daniela to bed with an improvised story about a poplar and a baobab who talk at night. His wife Verónica has gone to her drawing class and does not come home. As the hours pass without word, he keeps narrating: to the child, to himself, about his own past, and about the girl's imagined future.
Telling a story keeps an unresolved fear suspended. As long as the narrator keeps talking, the bad ending has not arrived, so the story lasts exactly as long as the uncertainty. The book says its story ends when Verónica returns, so its length is set by the length of her absence rather than by any plot.
Julián's place in Daniela's life exists through Verónica. Her failure to come home therefore threatens two losses at once: the partner and the parental role that depended on her.
He is writing for an audience that does not yet exist. That makes the present something to be witnessed later, and it turns parental fear into a question of how the child will one day interpret what happened.