In her fourth book, Daria Bignardi delivers a secret story. How can love be both the most creative and the most destructive force? What are we willing to lose for love, what are we willing to put on the line? Is it possible that complete happiness is revealed only in absolute unhappiness?

In Ferrara, Alma and Maio, two teenage siblings, live in a kind of mutual, enchanted dependence. Their family is close-knit. School is over, summer begins. Alma and Maio do not know it, that they are happy. For Alma it is a game when she proposes to her brother to try heroin. Just once, on the last night of freedom before joining her parents for vacation. But while she passes through the poison unscathed, Maio remains scarred. And one day he disappears. Bologna, 30 years later. Antonia, whom everyone calls Toni, is Alma's only daughter. She lives with Leo, a police commissioner she met during one of the inspections for the detective stories she writes. She ignores everything about Maio; her mother has never told her anything: perhaps to protect her, or perhaps the guilt is too great. But when Alma learns that Antonia is expecting her first child, she can no longer maintain the silence with which she has shielded herself. Toni is measured by a sudden vertigo: what can he do in the face of a secret that has erased all traces of his mother's past, and thus of his own? Toni returns to Ferrara to look for Maio. In that too-silent, muffled, impermeable city, through a maelstrom of encounters that from time to time give away a glimmer of truth that is immediately closed again, a chance at life, he begins a search that he thinks he is conducting in the name of his mother, but that will increasingly take possession of his soul, until it becomes revelation and self-recognition. Reflected in the investigation of Maio is the play of generations, the hidden figure of those dark years at the turn of the 1970s and 1980s, to Antonia's own fate. As her son grows inside her, Toni will have to take on herself, in a descent from mother to daughter, the thousands of questions that emerged by searching for Maio and the history of a family: how does one deserve love?