All Chapters of Nanny For The Ruthless Mafia King : Chapter 81 - Chapter 90

Luca began the third section of the piano piece in January of the eighth year, which was the January after the seventh Christmas and after the completion of the second section and after the conversation in the piano room where he had said: the third section is about being home, and she had understood that he had known the shape of the story all along, that he had been playing the household's seven years in music the way she had been writing them in words, and that neither of them had planned it that way and both of them had been doing it since the beginning. He began it on a Tuesday morning in the third week of January, which was a school day, which meant he played for forty minutes before breakfast with the focused, unhurried quality of someone who has arrived at the territory they have been approaching for years and who intends to enter it properly rather than quickly. He played slowly. He made errors and returned to the beginning of the phrase. He stopped and sat with the silence

Marco said something in December of the eighth year that Aria had been thinking about ever since, not because it was surprising, Marco was rarely surprising, but because it was the kind of thing that was obvious once said and that could not have been said before the saying of it and that changed the quality of the thing it described simply by naming it, the way naming things changed them, the way Luca's drawings made the household visible to itself in a form it could see and keep. It was a Thursday dinner in the third week of December, seven days before Christmas, and the park house contingent had come to the estate for this one because Rosa was staging the Christmas preparations in the estate kitchen and it made more sense for everyone to come to the food than for the food to travel to them. The table had the particular warmth of the late December Thursday dinners, which were different from the Christmas Eve dinner in being more ordinary, less formal, the warmth of people who had b

The summer of the eighth year was the summer Luca had predicted it would be, the summer that taught him what the ending of the piece was, though the teaching did not happen as he had expected it to happen, which was consistent with all the most important learnings in the household, which arrived not as revelations but as accumulations, not as a single moment of understanding but as the gradual assembly of understanding from many small moments that only became clear as understanding in retrospect, when you could look back and see that the knowing had been building across many days and had simply arrived at completeness on one particular afternoon that was otherwise ordinary. The ordinary afternoon was in August, on a Saturday, and what happened on it was this: Damien was in the garden with Luca, working in the orchard on the late-summer maintenance of the trees that had been replanted with Celeste's varieties and that were now eight years into their life in this soil and showing the

The new piece had a name, which was something the family piece had never had, having existed for nine years as simply the piece or our piece or Papa's piece until Luca had renamed it implicitly by the things he said about it, the first section about searching, the second section about knowing, the third section about being home, which was not a name but was more descriptive than any name could have been. The new piece had a name because it was someone else's piece, a composition by a living composer whose work Luca had encountered through the chess teacher two streets from the park house, who was also, it turned out, a serious amateur musician who had been attending concerts in the city for forty years and who had given Luca a recording of the piece after hearing him describe what he was looking for in his next project. Luca had described what he was looking for with characteristic precision: something that was technically demanding in a way that would require him to develop skills

The seventh book began, as Rosa had proposed, in a garden, but it did not begin as the book about what old people knew, because by the time Aria had been sitting in Rosa's garden on Thursday mornings for three months she understood that the book was not about what old people knew specifically but about something larger that the Thursday mornings were showing her, something that had to do with what happened when knowledge accumulated over long periods of sustained attention and became something qualitatively different from the knowledge of the same subject over a short period, not more of the same knowledge but a different kind of knowledge entirely, the knowledge that could only exist because of the time rather than despite it. She tried to explain this to Clare in April, on their regular call, with the particular difficulty of explaining a book that was not yet clearly itself. She said: It is about depth. Not expertise, which is a different thing. Expertise is knowing more about a