Prologue

Life is what happens to you while you’re busy making other plans.

Beautiful Boy (Darling Boy) – John Lennon - 1980

July 13th, 2025 - dinner time

I am sitting at a cosy restaurant with my wife, Cinzia, my son, Mattia, six years old, and my daughter, Aurora, three. We are here with some friends and family, celebrating Cinzia’s thirty-fifth birthday. Her belly is very large, as she is seven months pregnant with my third child, a son again.

We have been sitting for twenty minutes, waiting for the main course, when another couple enter the restaurant. A man in his mid-fifties, about five-foot-eight tall, a little bald, wearing a brand-name suit, expensive shoes, and a Rolex. He walks with a limp, using a cane, a couple of steps ahead of the woman. The woman is younger, five-foot-five tall, and I estimate she weighs two hundred pounds. I know it’s not fair, but the only adjective that comes to my mind looking at her is “fat”. She wears an elegant, expensive dress, yet it can’t hide her sagging curves. I know them both; they are married. She is forty-two, quite younger than her husband, but she shows many signs of age and looks about fifty.