Just a long, final exhale—and stillness.
My breath catches, and Leopardi’s words surface—those learned long before I understood why they mattered. Matteo used to quote them when a wine felt suspended between what it was and what it might become.
E il naufragar m’è dolce in questo mare.
The shipwreck is sweet in this sea.
I press my forehead to the sheet, as the rest of the poem ghosts through my mind—the unending silence, the boundless quiet—interminati spazi, an endless space—opening where the body can no longer follow.
Matteo has slipped past the hedge, past the limits of breath and bone, into the infinite he always believed waited just beyond what we could taste, measure, or hold.
I hear Nico move, and I hear him talk to the nurse.
I lean forward, instinct before thought, watching Matteo’s face for some sign I already know won’t come. The lines of pain have smoothed. His mouth is relaxed, almost peaceful, as though he has stepped into a room where he’s expected.
“Oh,” I whisper, the word barely a sound at all.
Then I feel Nico’s hand on my shoulder.I turn into him, soak him in as my chest heaves with sorrow.
The nurse checks what needs to be checked, then meets my eyes and nods once.
“He’s gone,” she says softly, like we didn’t know. “I’m so sorry for your loss.”
Gone. The word feels too small for Matteo, leaving the world.
I don’t cry at first.
I sit numbly, my fingers still curled around his, as if warmth might return if I hold on long enough.
Nico shifts closer, careful, as if grief has weight and might break if handled wrong. When I finally bend over Matteo’s hand and press my forehead to it, the sound that leaves me is hollow—like my heart is breaking open inside me.
Nico wraps his arm around my shoulders and draws me against him. After what feels like an endless forever, Nico extracts my hand from Matteo’s and carries me to the big armchair.
He holds me on his lap. I lean my head on his shoulder.
“Matteo was the first man who ever looked at me and saw a winemaker,” I tell him.
He never saw me as a dutiful daughter, or a piece of legacy, or a woman playing adult as my father does. No, Matteo saw possibility.
“He taught me patience,” I continue softly. “He taught me how to close my eyes and let the wine speak before answering it. How to listen—to vines, to barrels, to silence. How to wait, even when every instinct screams to act.”
Nico strokes my back in gentle circles.
“He believed in me when belief was easy.Andwhen it wasn’t.”
Nico’s hand stops for a moment and then continues to soothe me.
The sky outside continues its slow transformation, dawn arriving whether we are ready or not.
Birds begin to stir.
A new day starts.
We stay with Matteo until the light is fully risen and the room feels emptied of him and full of his memory.
“I don’t know what comes next,” I say as people start to come in and out of the house.
I hear the words “take the body.”
