The Secret in Their Eyes (Movie Tie-In Edition)

He'd never had anything special, nor anything good, and he'd always found that perfectly fair. And then he'd met Liliana, who was, to an enormous degree, both special and good. That was the reason why he remembered that morning so well, not because it was their last. He kept it in his memory just as he'd kept all the other mornings in the little over a year that had passed since their wedding.

Afterward, when Morales described to me, in meticulous detail, everything that had happened at that last breakfast with Liliana, he didn't go about it the way an ordinary person would. In general, people cobble together memories of their experiences from the hazy vestiges that have remained in their minds, or from fragments recalled from other, similar experiences, and with those vestiges and fragments they try to reconstruct circumstances or feelings they've lost forever. Not Morales.

Because he felt that Liliana gave him happiness he wasn't entitled to, happiness that had nothing to do with his life before he met her, and because the cosmos tends toward equilibrium, he knew he'd have to lose her sooner or later so that things could return to their proper order. All his memories of her were tinged with that sense of imminent disaster, of a catastrophe lying in wait around the corner.