The parting carried the sharp tang of metal and the bittersweet aftertaste of regret. Arianna was returning home, heading back toward that North which now seemed less like a prison and more like a challenge to be faced with new eyes. The brief holiday had left these two women—eternal girls suspended between myth and modernity—with a bittersweet lingering flavor: it was the taste of rediscovered awareness and responsibility, a blend of memories that, like salt in one's hair, only slipped away under the fresh water of daily reality.
For Belinda, staying behind was perhaps harder than leaving. There is a particular kind of solitude in remaining on the ground while a lifelong friend drifts toward the clouds, leaving a void that the echo of footsteps cannot fill.
"It's not like Instagram is shutting down, Beli! Don't make that heartbroken face," Arianna teased, trying to hide the tremor in her voice behind a superficial smile. In an instant, however, the masks fell away, and they found themselves locked in an embrace so tight it almost hurt—a desperate attempt to hold onto that Mediterranean warmth before the grey of Como could wash it away entirely.
Belinda watched Arianna vanish behind the automatic sliding doors of the departures lounge at Catania Fontanarossa Airport. She waited for a few minutes, almost hoping her friend would turn back for one last wave, then she heard the distant roar of engines cutting through the air. She imagined the plane lifting over the shimmering line of the Ionian Sea, banking slowly as the coast grew small—a delicate embroidery of seafoam and volcanic rock lost in the vastness of the blue.
The journey back to the coastal village with Elia was a slow re-entry into reality, but also a visual celebration of their land. Belinda sat beside her husband, watching through the window the eternal paradox of Sicily: the white snow already dusting the peaks of Etna, a pure ivory against the stark azure of the October sky, while along the roadside, the scorched earth still hosted the explosion of the prickly pears.
Belinda commented on every detail with a childlike wonder, the same enthusiasm her daughter Azzurra would have shown before a miracle of nature.
"Look, love, there's snow on Etna, and look—i ghiappiddari sunnu caricati di ficutinnia! (look, the prickly pear bushes are heavy with fruit!)" she exclaimed, pointing to the fat cactus paddles laden with thorny fruits, red and orange, looking like rubies embedded in the volcanic dust.
Elia glanced at her, a tender smile creasing the corners of his mouth.
"Si' chiu picciridda di to figghia, Beli (you're younger than your daughter, Beli)," he murmured, amused. He loved her for that very reason: for her capacity to fall in love with life every single day, for that contagious optimism that defied the shadows she carried within. They were accomplices in that landscape, children of an island that never denied a blade of luminous sun, even as autumn advanced with its first mountain chills.
However, Elia was also a man of flesh, bone, and concrete deadlines. As he drove toward home, he decided to interrupt his wife's daydreams with his usual, loving but firm, practicality.
"Listen, soul of mine... one cannot live on bread, love, and fantasy alone. Quannu a facemu na cosa pi soddi? (when are we going to do something for the money?)"
By "something," Elia did not mean an ordinary job. He was referring to a magical and practical act that would bring concrete help to the family. He thought of Azzurra's needs, of projects that required stability; and while he knew that money does not buy happiness, he recognized it as a valid shield to protect those he loved from life's storms.
Belinda remained silent, staring at the silhouette of the coast. The sea to her right was a mantle of dark blue velvet, as deep as her thoughts.
"You know, Elia, I wasn't sure. After everything that has happened in our family, I wouldn't want to soil our energy with a magical act directed at money. Because while it's true that money can help, it's also true that magic always asks for something in return, especially from the one who performs it. It is a debt contracted with forces we cannot always control, a balance I do not wish to break out of pure greed."
She sighed deeply, rolling the window all the way down to let herself be washed by the cool air that tasted of salt spray. She felt the responsibility of her new role weighing on her chest like a piece of volcanic stone. But Elia's gaze—so human and sincerely worried for their future—finally made her yield.
"Alright, love. As soon as we get home, I promise I will try. I will search through the old lines for a way that is right, clean, and does not awaken the ancient evil."
As soon as she crossed the threshold of the house, Belinda felt an almost physical need to isolate herself. She immediately shut herself in her studio, the room where silk threads and ancient fabrics coexisted with family secrets kept in scented wooden boxes. She began to reflect intensely, sifting through old texts of ancient magic passed down by her mother, Caterina, and her mother-in-law, Anna. She held a pen in her hand, the heavy grimoire resting on her knees; its yellowed pages seemed to whisper stories of women who, before her, had sought to bend fate to the needs of the domestic hearth.
Meanwhile, Elia had gone to his mother's house to pick up Azzurra, who had been spending the afternoon with Nonna Anna. As he entered, the scene before him made him sigh with a mix of irritation and resignation. Little Azzurra was busy with her grandmother in what looked like a miniature ritual—a game made of ancient gestures, intense gazes, and rhythmic whispers.
Elia snapped in a reproachful tone, addressing his mother:
"Ma, finemula cu sti mavarii! (Ma, let's end it with these sorceries!) Aren't you and my wife enough? Puru a picciridda? (The little one too?)"
Anna looked up, her eyes gleaming with a knowing mischief, and burst into a hearty laugh. A laugh that tasted of earth, aromatic herbs, and the sirocco wind.
"Oh, don't be a nuisance, Elia! It's only a game... e poi ava nzignari già d'ora (and besides, she has to learn starting now)," she shot back decisively. For Anna, magic was not an option or a pastime, but a heritage that flowed through the blood like sap through trees, and Azzurra had to learn to know and respect her power from her earliest years.
Elia shook his head, sighing deeply as he picked up his daughter, who smelled of lavender and a mystery he struggled to comprehend. He knew the battle was lost from the start against the women in his life. As he walked out, he felt the weight of the promise he had made to Belinda. Magic was entering their lives with a vengeance—no longer as a bedtime story or a folkloric relic, but as a real, tangible necessity. In the studio, Belinda turned another page of the grimoire. The silence was absolute, broken only by the steady beat of her heart and the dry rustle of the ancient paper. The time had come to test her gift for the practical things in life, hoping with all her soul that the "money" would not bring with it that price too high, which she so greatly feared.