All Chapters of Nanny For The Ruthless Mafia King : Chapter 41 - Chapter 50

The wedding lunch was in the formal dining room, which had now hosted two significant meals in six months and was, Aria thought, beginning to understand its own purpose. Mrs. Fenn had worked with Rosa on the menu with the complementary efficiency that was their established working mode, Rosa providing the vision and Mrs. Fenn the execution, and the table was set with the warmth of someone who understood that formal and welcoming were not opposites. It was a small table. Eight people: Aria and Damien, Luca and Marco, Rosa and Felix, Elena and Max. Diane had stayed for the ceremony and departed gracefully before lunch, understanding without being told that this particular meal was for the inner circle, and she was the kind of person who understood things like that without requiring explanation. Max, for his part, was having the best day of his five years. He was sitting between Luca and Elena, which meant he was receiving simultaneous input from Luca's precise, detailed observations

She finished the first draft on a Tuesday in July, two months after the wedding, at eleven-seventeen in the morning, in the study with the window open to the summer garden and the sound of the house around her, Luca at school, Damien in the room down the hall on a call, Mrs. Fenn somewhere in the lower floors doing the particular quiet work that kept the household running. She typed the last sentence, read it back once, and then sat for a long time looking at the screen. Two hundred and thirty-one pages. Ten months of events and observation and feeling, shaped into something that had a beginning and a middle and an end, a through-line from a waiting room that smelled like fresh paint and old money to a kitchen table on a May morning after a wedding in a garden where someone had planted flowers that came back every year. She did not immediately tell Damien. Not because she was keeping it from him but because she needed a few hours to sit with the fact of it before it became somethi

The second year of Luca's schooling began in September with the particular confidence of a child who had done this before and knew what it required, which was different from the first September in every way that mattered. There was no held breath at the gate, no hand gripping hers with the focused tension of someone who had decided to be brave and was executing the decision. There was simply Luca, his bag over one shoulder, his portfolio left at home because he had determined some months ago that a portfolio was not a school-day item but that a single sketchbook was, and the sketchbook was in his bag, and he was ready. He went through the gate and turned once, not because he was uncertain but because he had decided that turning once was the appropriate acknowledgment of the people who had brought him, a formality he had apparently developed over the summer as a considered alternative to not turning at all, which he had determined was correct for September of the first year but no lo

Clare the literary agent was, as Elena had suggested, a person who knew what she was doing and did not waste time doing it. The first call was forty-five minutes and left Aria with a clear understanding of what the agent thought the book was, what she believed it could do, and what the process of bringing it to that point would require. It also left her with a specific question she needed to answer before any of the rest of it could proceed. The question was: how much of your own life are you willing to have in public? Clare had asked it directly and without apparent judgment, in the tone of someone who had asked it many times and understood that the answer varied and that all answers were valid as long as they were honest. She had said: The book is clearly drawn from lived experience. The details are changed and the names are changed and you have been careful, but the emotional truth of it is specific in a way that only comes from having actually been inside what you are describi

It was December again. The second December since Aria had come to this house, and it arrived with the particular quality of the second time, which was different from the first in the way all returns were different from arrivals, warmer and more specific, the warmth of the known thing rather than the warmth of the discovered thing, both of which were their own kind of valuable. Rosa came on the twenty-first, because Rosa had declared the previous December a success and saw no reason to alter a working arrangement. She arrived with the panettone and the bag and the particular energy of a woman who had been thinking about the kitchen since approximately September and was ready to put that thinking to use. Felix came an hour later, with his small bag and the lightness that had become his characteristic quality over the past year, the lightness of a man who had set down a weight he had carried for decades and was still, regularly, surprised to find it gone. Marco arrived for dinner on t