Page 10 of The Billionaire’s Nanny

"Anything interesting happen?"

"Not really."

She had run boardrooms that yielded more information under less pressure. She glanced at Lucy, not quite asking for help and not quite able to stop herself from wanting it, and Lucy set down her fork with the unhurried patience of a woman who had clearly done this exact translation work before.

"Grace, tell your aunt about the hamster."

Grace's face did something complicated—a flicker of the earlier animation trying to surface against three weeks of learned caution—and for a moment Carrington thought it might actually work.

"There's a hamster at school. Kayla's. It ate chocolate once and didn't die." Grace delivered it in the same flat cadence as everything else she'd said tonight, all the color drained back out of it, a story that had been alive in the kitchen and was reciting itself dutifully now, on command, for an audience it didn't trust.

"That's… unusual," Carrington said, aware even as she said it that this was the wrong response, that somewhere in the transaction between kitchen and table the entire currency of the story had changed, and she didn't know the new exchange rate.

"Yeah." Grace looked back at her plate.

Lucy caught Carrington's eye across the table, not unkindly, and something in the look told Carrington she had witnessed the whole failed trade and understood exactly which party had walked away with the loss. It was not pity. Carrington could have tolerated pity; she had built an entire career on being underestimated and then correcting the record. This was something closer to sympathy extended to an equal, which was worse, because it implied Lucy thought she was watching someone try and fail rather than someone who simply hadn't bothered.

She had bothered. She wanted, with an intensity that embarrassed her, to say so out loud. I built you a folder, I rearranged four calls, I am trying in the only language I have ever been fluent in. She understood, watching Grace push a single pea to the edge of her plate without eating it, that none of that would translate either.

The rest of dinner passed in the kind of careful quiet that Carrington associated with hostile mergers in their final, exhausted hour, everyone aware of what wasn't being said and no one willing to be the one who said it.

Grace went up with Lucy at eight, per the schedule, because tonight was not one of Carrington's two. Carrington remained at the table with a glass of wine she had no more intention of drinking than she'd had at the funeral, and listened to their footsteps recede up the staircase together, Grace's voice starting up again halfway up the flight—audible, unguarded, already returning to the register she'd used in the kitchen, as though the version of herself she kept for her aunt lived only downstairs and got shed at the landing like a coat.

Carrington sat with that a while.

She was still sitting with it twenty minutes later when Lucy came back down alone, pausing at the base of the stairs rather than continuing on toward the cottage, and Carrington understood, from the set of her shoulders, that she had something to say and had decided to say it here rather than write it into the log.

"She's reading to herself tonight," Lucy said. "Wanted to do the next chapter on her own. I think that's good, for what it's worth."

"Is it?"

"It means she trusts the story will still be there without me holding it for her." Lucy came the rest of the way down into the hall light, and Carrington noticed, with the specific irritation of someone cataloguing a fact she had no use for, that Lucy had taken her hair down somewhere between the top of the stairs and the bottom. It fell loose around her shoulders now, looser than it had been all evening, a few strands catching gold instead of brown under the hall sconces. She'd pushed her cardigan sleeves up past her elbows hours ago and never bothered pulling them back down, and there was a faint color along her cheekbones—from the stairs, or from whatever she'd worked up the nerve to say next—that made her look, entirely without trying to, like a woman who had stopped performing for the day and simply hadn't noticed anyone was still watching. Carrington had spent thirty years in rooms with women who paid considerable sums to look exactly this unstudied, and not one of them had ever managed it. She filed the observation away with the rest of the evening's unwanted data and did not examine it further.

"Ms. Cole. Can I say something, and you don't have to agree with it?"

"You never seem to require my agreement first."

"No," Lucy said, "I suppose I don't." The corner of her mouth moved, not quite a smile, gone before it landed. "I watched you at dinner. Trying to get her to talk."

"It went poorly. I'm aware."

"It's not about tonight." Lucy held her gaze, steady, the way she'd held it across the desk on the first day, unafraid of the silence that usually did the work of unraveling people for Carrington rather than the other way around. "I don't think this is really about the hamster, or the schedule, or any of it. I think you're not worried I'm taking your place with her, Ms. Cole. I think you're worried you'll spend so much energy protecting yourself from losing her that you'll wake up one day having lost her anyway, the exact same way you lost her mother."

The room went very still.

Carrington had absorbed worse things from better negotiators, had sat through hostile takeover attempts with her expression fully intact while men twice her age tried to dismantle her company across a conference table, and she found, with something close to fury, that she had no immediate defense against four sentences delivered quietly by a woman standing in her own front hall in a cardigan.

"You overstate your understanding of my sister," she said, and heard the coldness land in it exactly the way it had the first time, a tell she despised in herself and could not, apparently, retire.

"Maybe. I never met her." Lucy didn't retreat from the correction, didn't soften it into an apology the way most people would have, scrambling to undo the damage the moment they saw it land. "But I've watched you flinch every time Grace does something that, I imagine, looks like Clara did it, and I've watched you build a folder instead of sitting at a table, and I think somewhere under all of that is a woman who already knows exactly how this story goes if she doesn't do something different, and is terrified of it anyway."

"That will be all, Ms. Harper."

"Understood." Lucy inclined her head, unbothered, or unwilling to show otherwise, and turned toward the door to the cottage. She stopped there, the same way she'd stopped at the study threshold three weeks earlier. "For what it's worth, I don't think it's too late. I just think you're going to have to decide that on purpose, because it won't happen by accident. Goodnight, Ms. Cole."

She left. Carrington sat alone at the table with a wine glass she still hadn't touched and did not move for a long time.

She retreated to the study because the study was where she went when she needed the version of herself that could be trusted not to do anything unwise, and she told it to herself in those exact terms, opening her laptop with more force than the gesture required. There was a term sheet from the Ashgrove acquisition that needed her attention before the Tokyo markets opened. There was a draft response to the Business Journal's request for comment on Q3 projections. There was work, actual work, the kind she had built an entire identity around being incapable of neglecting, and she gave it forty minutes of her genuine attention before she noticed she had read the same clause in the Ashgrove document four times without retaining a single word of it.