Page 33 of The Billionaire’s Nanny

"I've never looked at them," Carrington said.

"No," Lucy said. "I don't suppose you have."

Lucy didn't get back into the bed. She crossed to the far corner instead, where the sheet had come out from under the mattress in a long gray rope. She picked it up and shook it out and started tucking it back in, working along the side with the heel of her hand, completely naked, at one in the morning.

"Leave it," Carrington said.

"It'll be under your back all night," Lucy said, and finished the corner, and did the bottom one too because she was already down there.

Carrington drank the water and put the glass on the nightstand next to the heap of pins and watched her do it. When Lucy was finished, she came back around and got back in bed, pulled the covers up over both of them, and settled her arm where it had been. Her hair was a wreck. There was a red mark coming up on her shoulder that was going to still be there on Sunday.

The clock said twenty past one. In forty minutes, the path lights would go off on the timer and the sixty feet down to the cottage would be black, and Lucy had walked it up here in a coat with no gloves on and would walk it back the same way.

Carrington wanted her in this bed in the morning. "Don't go back down the path tonight."

Lucy didn't answer for a while.

"The lights go off in half an hour," Carrington said. "And the gravel carries, and the chef lets herself in through the courtyard at six, so you'd have to be back before⁠—"

She stopped.

None of that was why. She was lying in her own bed with a woman's arm across her, arranging a schedule.

"Okay," Lucy said.

"That's all?" Carrington asked.

"That's all," Lucy said, and turned the lamp off.

At ten past four, Carrington was still awake. Lucy had fallen asleep somewhere before two, on her front, with one arm up under the pillow and her face turned away, and she had not moved since. Carrington lay on her back with her hands folded on top of the covers and looked at the ceiling and then at the room.

Two shoes by the chair, not together. The cardigan Lucy had been wearing under the coat, dropped on the seat, with both sleeves still shoved up past where the elbows had been, because Lucy had not pulled a sleeve back down since the day she got here. A glass with an inch of water in it. And the pins on the nightstand, seven or eight of them in a pile where Lucy had taken them out of her hair. Everything else on that floor was Lucy's.

Out the window, the courtyard and the kitchen wing were black. At twenty to six, the light over the range would come on, and then the one in the back passage, and by seven there would be a van at the service gate and somebody on the stairs with a basket. Grace got up at ten past seven and came down the landing past this door in bare feet, every morning, and stood in the kitchen doorway waiting to be told what day of the week it was.

Carrington's hands were cold on top of the covers. She slid them under. Thirty years, and she had never once lain down with a problem and failed to have it in pieces by morning. The school picnic was in eight days. Eleven o'clock, the shelter with the roof, two hundred parents. She lay there and looked at the ceiling and did not do one thing about any of it.

At half past four, she got up out of bed. She did it slowly, a leg at a time, and Lucy made a noise into the pillow but didn't wake. Carrington lifted the robe off the back of the door and stepped out onto the landing and pulled the door closed behind her without letting the latch click.

Grace's door was second on the left and standing ajar. The night light was in its socket, and Grace was face-down on the pillow with one foot sticking out from under the blanket and the gray rabbit tucked somewhere under her arm.

Carrington stayed a while in the hallway, even though nobody needed anything from her. Then she went back down the landing and got the door open without noise and let herself back in her bedroom with her hand still on the handle.

Lucy had rolled over. She had taken most of the covers with her and left the corner turned back on the near side. She was breathing with her mouth open into the pillow.

Carrington took the robe off, and laid it on the chair with the cardigan, and crawled back into bed.

14

LUCY

She spent three nights crunching up sixty feet of gravel before she thought of walking on the grass beside it. The grass made no noise at all. It was also wet with dew until nine in the morning, so she carried her shoes in one hand and put them on at the top with her feet already soaked, and twice on the way back down she stepped into the flower bed to the ankle.

Every night now, she left the light on over the stove. A dark cottage would have meant she was somewhere else. A lit one meant she was up reading with her feet on the couch, and about two nights a week that was true.

She learned the rest of the schedule by watching the staff. The range light came on at twenty to six, and the chef let herself in under it through the courtyard door, which had a bolt at the top nobody had ever used. That made at least half an hour before six the deadline. Lucy wanted to be up in that house at night more than she wanted to be sensible about it, so she set an alarm for a quarter past five and went up anyway.

She was always the one who went up to the main house. Carrington had not once come down the path, and neither of them had said anything about it. The cottage had one window and it faced the courtyard, six feet from the bed. Anybody crossing at night could look straight in. Carrington's room had a door that shut and locked, so they used Carrington's instead, and stayed quiet for Grace, asleep two doors down the landing.