บททั้งหมดของ Nanny For The Ruthless Mafia King : บทที่ 51 - บทที่ 55

January came into the house for the third time since Aria had arrived in it, and she found that she was now able to measure the passage of time by the quality of things she recognised rather than by the novelty of things she was encountering for the first time. The first January she had been barely four months into the household and everything had still been recent enough to carry the particular shimmer of the new. The second January she had been writing the book and finishing the first draft and beginning to understand what the household was and what her place in it was. The third January she was simply here, simply home, in the specific and irreplaceable way of someone for whom the ordinary rhythms of a place had become the architecture of their daily life. It was a good January. The kind that arrived without pretension, grey and cold and requiring nothing of anyone except the basic courtesies of a cold month: warm rooms, good food, the particular pleasure of being indoors when th

The editing process was completed in April, the final version of the manuscript arriving at a form that Harriet described as exactly what it needed to be, which was the best possible editorial verdict because it meant the book had become more completely itself rather than more completely what someone else thought it should be. The book was now three hundred and forty pages. It began with the opening page Aria had written at Harriet's suggestion, the bare account of the house before she arrived, the silence and the locked piano room and the doorway and the small boy who had stopped speaking. It moved through the year she had lived inside the household and ended in the May morning after the wedding with toast being made and Luca drawing tomorrow. Luca's drawings were integrated throughout, twenty-three of them in total, selected from the portfolio with Luca's approval after a process of review that he conducted with the seriousness of a professional art director. He had accepted twen

The summer before the book was published had a quality that Aria would remember in later years as distinct from the other summers in the house, not louder or more eventful but more attended to, as though the impending publication had sharpened her awareness of ordinary things in the way that impending change always sharpened awareness, the particular clarity of someone who knows that something is about to become different and pays closer attention to the way it is now while it is still the way it is. She was not anxious about the publication. She found this surprising enough to examine carefully, turning the absence of anxiety over in her mind to make sure it was genuine and not performed, and arriving at the conclusion that it was real. The book was done. It was as good as she could make it. It was honest and complete and she had made every decision about it with full information and with the agreement of the people it concerned. What happened after it was published was not within