Morning coffee at the Villa carried the dense flavor of truths that emerge only when the light is too clear for secrets to hide. The October sun, still generous and caressing, filtered through the large windows of Belinda's workshop, hitting the silk spools and transforming them into small cylinders of pure light. The air smelled of starch, bergamot tea, and that ferrous scent the volcanic stone of the patio exhaled under the first heat of the day.
Belinda observed her lifelong friend. Arianna sat with her legs tucked up on the straw chair, a position she had maintained since they were girls, back when they would hide together among the beach pebbles to fantasize about what the future held beyond the Ionian horizon. Her hands—long and slender—were clamped around the steaming cup, as if she were trying to absorb every single wave of heat. Her mahogany-red hair, usually a flame of pride and rebellion, fell over her face in untidy locks, veiling those black eyes Belinda had seen challenge the entire world. But today, in those eyes, there was no defiance. There was a weary fog that did not belong to the colors of Sicily.
"I'm not just here to breathe in the salt, Beli," Arianna began, and her deep voice seemed to crack, like a violin string stretched to its absolute limit. "I ran away. Or perhaps, for the first time in my life, I'm trying to put back together the pieces of a mirror that I shattered myself."
Belinda set down her needle and the piece of linen she was hemming. The silence in the workshop grew heavy, interrupted only by the buzzing of a late bee against the glass. She knew that Arianna—the "master of the wind" who taught the children of Como not to fear thunderstorms—did not ask for help with high-flown words, but with silences heavy with meaning.
"In Como... life became a dress that was too tight, the kind that cuts off your breath the moment you try to sit down and rest," Arianna continued, a bitter smile touching her olive-toned face without reaching her eyes. "You know me, Beli. I'm the one who accepts no restrictions, the one who has always lived without looking at the clock, guided only by instinct. But fate has an atrocious sense of humor: it gave me exactly everything I thought I wanted, and then used it to lock me in a cage of responsibility I wasn't ready to handle."
She sipped her coffee, closing her eyes for a moment as if trying to visualize her house in the North. "Being a mother... it's a kind of protection that looks nothing like your magical embroideries. There are no symbols to save you from sleepless nights, from tantrums that last for hours, from the weight of having to be the pillar of everything when you yourself feel made of sand slipping away. I have two children, Beli. Sofia is five, the same age as Azzurra: she has my stubborn head and my black eyes, and she looks at me every day as if I were a deity capable of solving anything—even when I don't even know where I've put my own life. And then there's Leo, the little one; he's only three. He is pure energy, a localized earthquake that never stops and demands every millimeter of my vital space."
Arianna ran a hand through her mahogany hair, tugging slightly as if to banish a physical pain. "Marco, my partner, stayed in Como with them. He's a wonderful man—solid—one of those who doesn't panic over broken washing machines or desperate cries. But his very perfection, his ability to hold it all up, made me feel inadequate, almost like a stranger in my own home. I found myself staring at the mountains around the lake, wishing I were a cloud just to glide away over the peaks and vanish into nothingness."
Arianna's story descended into the details of a daily grind that, for Belinda—despite a life marked by the shadows of London—seemed almost more frightening than a curse. Arianna spoke of the crushing stress at school, the exhaustion of managing thirty children for half the day and then coming home to manage two more, without ever a moment of emptiness, of silence, or of solitude.
"I had reached the point where I would cry in the car, locked in the supermarket parking lot, just to delay going inside the house by ten minutes," she confessed, a solitary tear tracing a line down her dark skin. "Not because I don't love them. I love them more than my own skin, Beli. But I wasn't prepared for the total surrender of myself. The free woman who ran on the shores of our Riviera was dying under the weight of grocery lists and parent-teacher meetings. So, one evening, Marco looked at me and said: 'Ari, go. Go back to Sicily. Go back to your mother's house, go back to Belinda. Go back to being a daughter, before you completely forget how to do it.'"
Belinda took her hand, squeezing it tight. Arianna's skin was warm, electric, but her fingers trembled slightly. "You aren't a worse mother because you need space, Ari. You're just a woman who has reached the bottom of her energy reserves. Even the earth of our Etna needs to lie fallow for a while if it wants to yield good fruit again."
"It's just that I feel so guilty," Arianna whispered, staring at the horizon where the sea met the sky. "Here I am, enjoying the October sun and fishing with you at dawn, while Marco juggles nursery runs and pajamas. I'm living at my mother's house in the next village over, and she treats me like I'm fifteen again. She makes me breakfast; she tucks me in at night. And I let myself be cradled, Beli. I let myself be cradled because in Como, I'm the one who has to cradle everyone else, and my arms had grown too tired to hold that weight any longer."
They remained in silence for an indefinite time, bound by that complicity that only friends raised among the scents of the Ionian coastal villages know how to cultivate. Belinda thought about how life had distributed different burdens on their shoulders: she fought silent curses to protect Azzurra, while Arianna fought the deafening noise of a "normalcy" that was devouring her soul.
"This week without work, without children, without responsibility... it is my medicine," Arianna concluded, lifting her face toward the light. "Coming back to my village to find myself again. When I return to the North, I will be the mother of Sofia and Leo once more. But today, in this moment... I am just Arianna. And the sea is telling me that it's okay."
Belinda hugged her, feeling Arianna's slender leanness against her—that nervous frame built to run in the wind, not to stand still between four walls. "It's okay, Ari. It's perfectly okay."
When Arianna left the workshop to get back into her car and drive to the next village, Belinda stood by the window. She watched the road and saw her friend's dark silhouette receding, her mahogany hair glowing like embers under the midday sun.
She picked up a scrap of mahogany silk and began to embroider a small symbol she had never dared to use before: an open circle, a knot unraveling into a feather. A talisman for those who have the courage to say "I can't do it"—for those who know that true strength is not never falling, but knowing when it is time to come home to let the heart be healed.