09 · Burgundy — France

With Sabine beside me, the future no longer felt distant — it had become a place. I looked across the vineyards and imagined new seasons, my children, their children, whatever might remain when I no longer had the strength to ride the estate.

For years I’d chased work, responsibilities, results. Yet serenity had chosen that corner of Burgundy, and the woman time had unexpectedly returned to me. We spoke little — after a certain age, silence tells the truth more clearly than words. Wine matured slowly in its barrels. My children visited more often. For the first time in years, I looked at my life without wanting to change anything.

And I had reached ninety-one years of age. An age at which a man believes he’s seen enough to be surprised by nothing. I was wrong.

Because I never expected another car to come up the long driveway. Another woman. Another young man. The vehicle stopped a few meters away. I looked at Sabine, then at the car, then at the young man stepping out. The woman studied the house, then looked at me — the expression of someone who hadn’t arrived by chance, who’d spent years searching. I felt Sabine stiffen beside me.

She stepped forward, watching me too carefully, as if searching for confirmation. Then she smiled — a gentle, almost melancholy smile — and asked a single question: “Are you Ferdinando Frega?”

I didn’t answer immediately. Fear doesn’t always come from what we don’t know — sometimes it comes from what we might recognize.

In that moment I understood something ninety-one years had failed to teach me: life rarely closes its unfinished accounts. It keeps them, protects them, lets them mature slowly, like wine resting in a barrel — and then, just when we believe the story is ending, it opens a door we thought had been sealed forever.

I stood motionless, with Sabine beside me, that woman in front of me, two young men belonging to different stories — or perhaps to the same one. And for the first time, I felt no urgency to know the answer. Because destiny hadn’t come to close the book. It had come to add another page.