Page 2 of The Billionaire’s Nanny

She went. Her heels found the uneven grass with the same precision they found marble, and she stopped two feet from Grace. She did not crouch, because crouching felt like a performance and Grace, she suspected, would see through a performance faster than the adults who kept trying one on her.

"Grace… do you remember me? I'm Carrington."

"I know who you are." Grace didn't look up from the casket. Her voice was small but not soft. Sharp, almost, in a way that made something in Carrington recognize itself. "You're my aunt, the one from the news."

It landed exactly where Clara had once aimed it, years ago, and Carrington absorbed it the way she absorbed a bad quarterly report: without visible reaction, filing the damage for later.

"That's right." She held out her hand, because it was the gesture she knew, the one that had closed a hundred deals and opened exactly none of the doors she actually needed opened. "It's nice to see you again."

Grace looked at the hand. She looked at it for long enough that two of the book club women exchanged a glance over her head, long enough that the wind had time to pull one dark curl loose from the crooked braid and lay it across her cheek, and then she put both of her own hands behind her back, out of reach, and looked back at the casket.

"I don't want to hold hands," Grace said. "I want my mom."

There was no answer to that. Carrington had answers for hostile boards, for journalists, for men who underestimated her in rooms full of other men who knew better. She had spent thirty years building a reputation on always having the answer. But today, she had nothing, standing on a windswept cliff in front of a seven-year-old who had just told her, without cruelty, only fact, exactly how far down the list of acceptable substitutes she ranked.

"No," Carrington said finally. "I don't imagine you do."

She lowered her hand. Grace didn't watch her do it.

The reception was held at Clara's house, a two-story Craftsman a mile back from the cliffs with a wraparound porch and a garden that had clearly been someone's joy and no one's discipline—climbing roses gone leggy over a trellis, herbs bolting in their beds, a bird feeder someone had forgotten to fill. Carrington stood in the kitchen with a glass of white wine she had no intention of drinking and watched through the window over the sink. Grace sat alone on the porch steps while twenty adults orbited around her at what they clearly believed was a respectful distance and what Carrington recognized as simple avoidance. No one knew what to say to a child whose mother had died three weeks after a diagnosis no one had seen coming. Carrington didn't know what to say to her either. At least she was honest about it.

"Ms. Cole." The voice came from behind her, and Carrington turned to find a woman in her sixties, silver-haired, holding a slim leather folio the way other people at this party were holding drinks. "Diane Bell. I was your sister's attorney."

"I remember your name from the estate paperwork." Carrington set the wine down, untouched, and became, in the space of one breath, entirely the woman who ran Cole Developments. Grief could wait in the next room. Business could not. "You'll want somewhere private, I assume."

"If you have a few minutes."

They found Clara's study—book-crowded, chaotic, a cardigan still slung over the back of the desk chair as though she'd meant to come back for it—and Diane closed the door against the noise of the reception gently, as if she had delivered this kind of news often enough to know exactly how much silence it required afterward.

"I'll be direct, since I understand you appreciate that." Diane opened the folio. "Clara updated her will a month ago, shortly after her diagnosis. There's a great deal of documentation, and my office will walk you through all of it this week. But there's one provision I wanted you to hear from me directly, before the reading, so you weren't blindsided in a room full of her friends."

"Go on."

"Clara named you sole legal guardian of Grace."

The words arrived and did not, for a moment, mean anything. Carrington heard them the way she'd heard the priest on the cliff—sound without immediate translation—and then the translation caught up all at once, the way a stock price catches up to bad news after a half-second of denial. Her stomach fell through the floor.

"That can't be right." It was the first sentence she'd spoken all day that hadn't been fully vetted before it left her mouth.

"It's unambiguous. I drafted it myself." Diane's expression didn't shift. "No other family is named as an alternative. No friends, no godparents. You, specifically, by name, with a personal letter attached that Clara asked me to give you privately rather than read into the official record. I have it here, if you'd like it now."

Carrington did not take the envelope Diane held out. She looked at it the way she might look at a contract with a clause she couldn't yet parse, and behind her ribs the crack that had been spreading all morning went, finally, all the way through.

She had not spoken to her sister in two years. She had missed the birthday before that, and the one before that, had sent envelopes instead of herself to every occasion that mattered because envelopes didn't argue and didn't ask questions she couldn't answer and didn't look at her the way Clara had looked at her—the way Grace had looked at her, ten minutes ago, on the porch steps of a house she would apparently now be responsible for. She had shown up exactly once when it counted, at the very end, in a hospital room that had smelled of antiseptic and machinery, and even then she had stood by the window with her phone in her hand, half a person, because half a person was all she'd trained herself to be able to spare.

And Clara—furious, funny, reckless, warm, everything Carrington had never allowed herself to be—had looked at that half a person and decided, in writing, with a lawyer and witnesses, that she was still the one to trust with the only thing that mattered.

It was forgiveness Carrington had done nothing to earn, and it resounded in her ears now like a verdict she couldn't appeal.

"I'll want a copy of everything," she said, because that was a sentence she knew how to build, unlike the one underneath it. "The medical guardianship terms, the trust structure, the school enrollment, all of it. Today, if possible."

"Of course."

"And I'll need to know what she's used to. Routines. Doctors. Whatever this—" the word child rose and she rejected it, too clinical even for her "—whatever Grace needs, structurally, to keep her life from falling apart on top of everything else that already has."

Diane studied her for a moment longer than was strictly professional. "Of course. And… I should ask how you’re feeling also."

"It doesn’t matter how I'm feeling." Carrington did not elaborate, because elaborating would have required naming it, and naming it was not a thing she was prepared to do in a dead woman's study with the ink barely dry on the paperwork that made her, as of just a few weeks ago and without her knowledge, a mother in every sense but the biological one. "I'm asking what's required. There's a difference."