The flight to London Heathrow took approximately three hours, a journey Belinda had made dozens of times without ever a hint of trouble. But that day, as soon as the plane reached cruising altitude over the Alps, the golden idyll shattered.
It began with a dull pressure behind her eyes, an annoyance Belinda tried to ignore by sipping some tea. Within minutes, however, the pressure transformed into a searing throb, as if a white-hot nail were being slowly driven into her temples. Nausea erupted—sudden and violent—forcing her to grip the armrests so tightly her knuckles turned white.
"Beli, what's happening? You're pale as a ghost," Elia whispered, alarmed. Belinda found herself unable to speak. Every vibration of the aircraft's engines thundered inside her skull like a cannon blast. Those three hours of flight became an eternal ordeal, a descent into a physical hell that clouded her vision. She saw flashes of green dancing in the darkness—the same colors she had seen seven years prior.
The moment the plane touched down and the doors opened, Belinda didn't even have time to breathe in the cold London air. Her legs gave way on the jet bridge. She vanished into the void, collapsing into Elia's arms as Mattia, who was waiting at arrivals, rushed toward them with his heart in his throat.
"Take her, let's get her to the emergency room now! We'll be faster than the ambulance!" Mattia shouted. As Elia and Mattia loaded Belinda into the car, Erica took hold of Azzurra, who was sobbing uncontrollably, clutching her backpack with her ballet slippers inside. The dream vacation had ended before it had even begun.
The London hospital was a labyrinth of neon lights and the smell of disinfectant. Elia paced back and forth in the waiting room, his hands in his hair, unable to fathom how his perfect life could have imploded in a single afternoon. After hours of tests, CT scans, and frantic consultations, a weary-looking doctor approached him.
"Mr. Elia, the situation is extremely critical," the doctor began in technical English that Mattia had to translate with a trembling voice. "Your wife has a massive cerebral edema. The fluid is compressing her brain against the walls of her skull, preventing her from waking up. She has entered a state of deep coma. Furthermore, a sudden, acute renal failure has emerged. The kidneys are not filtering out toxins."
Elia listened without comprehension. Edema? Failure? Belinda had always been fine.
"We are administering massive IV drips of diuretics and corticosteroids to reduce the cranial pressure," the doctor continued, "but we must move with extreme caution. If we push too hard, the creatinine levels will rise further, destroying the kidneys and forcing us into dialysis. It is a precarious balance: we either save the brain or save the kidneys. In the meantime, we do not know if or how she will wake up. The next seventy-two hours will be decisive."
Belinda lay in an ICU bed, connected to machines that emitted rhythmic, merciless sounds. A week of coma passed like a never-ending nightmare. Her head was bandaged, her body swollen from fluids, her face unrecognizable. Elia remained seated beside her, staring at those hands that once embroidered destinies and now looked like inert wax. He wondered, with a terror he dared not admit even to himself, if this was the "lead" meant to balance the gold of those past years. Had the time come to pay the debt? The medical diagnosis spoke of edema and creatinine, but in the depths of his heart, Elia felt that what was killing Belinda was not a disease, but the price of an enchantment that allowed no discounts.