There were five Macedonian citizens in the car. Three were killed, two of them children. Two were injured - one airlifted by helicopter, the other, the driver, taken by ambulance. Those are all the figures the police confirmed, and we are deliberately not adding anything to them that has not been confirmed.

The crash happened at around 16:30 on the coastal motorway in Slovenia, on the stretch between Unec and the roadworks near Ravbarkomanda. A lorry had stopped in the hard shoulder because of a breakdown. The driver of the car then struck the rear left of the trailer. A doctor pronounced the three passengers dead at the scene.

The Ministry of Foreign Affairs officially confirmed the reports, citing information received from the Slovenian police and from the Macedonian diplomatic and consular mission in Ljubljana. The embassy in Ljubljana immediately contacted the relevant Slovenian institutions and is in contact with the families, whom it is helping with the transport of the bodies. That is the part of the job diplomacy rarely gets credit for and is usually mentioned only like this.

A lorry in the hard shoulder, in the middle of the afternoon

The cause of the collision is still being established. The scene was examined by police officers, an investigating judge and a district state prosecutor - which means the procedure is open and the answer will come from an investigation, not from the first reports. The motorway towards Koper was closed for several hours, and traffic returned to normal late in the evening.

But one detail is worth holding on to: a heavy lorry stopped in the hard shoulder, on a motorway, in daylight. That is a situation European roads have solved on paper - warning triangle, lights, high-visibility vest, and on the busiest stretches, systems that warn drivers of an obstacle several kilometres in advance. Whether such a system was working there, and how long the lorry had been standing before the crash, are questions the investigation has to answer. They are not rhetorical.

The road we drive every summer

This stretch is not unfamiliar to Macedonian drivers. It is the route towards Koper, towards Italy, towards the north - the same one thousands of families from Macedonia cover every summer and every holiday, usually with a full car, usually on a drive of twelve hours or more, usually with children in the back.

We are not turning that sentence into a lesson. None of those five people did anything the rest of us do not do. That is the whole weight of the story.

What the institutions can do is concrete and measurable: establish why a broken-down lorry stayed in the hard shoulder long enough, and what the Slovenian traffic protocols say about such a situation. The result of that investigation is the only thing that can mean something to some other family.

For now only the number remains, and it is enough. Three people set off somewhere and did not arrive.