Page 4 of The Billionaire’s Nanny

Anjali laughed, but it didn't quite cover the worry underneath it, and Lucy saw her glance, the kind of glance you gave a friend when you were doing math about her in your head. "How's the new room working out?”

"It's a room." Lucy shrugged, aiming for lighter than she felt. "It's got a window. The landlady's very sweet and extremely nosy, which I've decided is a fair trade. I'm not going to pretend it's the Marchetti house. It's not four bedrooms and a garden and somebody else paying for the electric." She said it evenly, like a fact filed away rather than a wound reopened, and reached for another of Anjali's fries to give her hands something else to do besides betray her.

"Lucy." Mira's voice had gone quieter, careful in a way Mira almost never bothered to be. "I'm just going to say the thing. You could let one of us help. Just until you land somewhere. It's not charity, it's… I don't know, forward motion. You'd do it for either of us in about four seconds."

"I'm not borrowing money, Mira."

"I didn't say borrow, I said⁠—"

"I'm not taking money." Lucy said it lightly enough, but there was a wall behind it that both women had learned, over years of friendship, not to push on more than once. "I appreciate it. Genuinely. But I did the thing already where I let someone else hold the ground under my feet, and then they decided they wanted the ground back with no notice, and I am not doing that particular dance again. Not even with people I love. Especially not with people I love."

Nobody said Elena's name. Nobody had to. It sat at the table anyway, the way it always did when the conversation drifted anywhere near money, or houses, or four years of somebody else's children calling her the wrong thing on accident—Mama, once, out of Josie, at a school assembly, in front of forty other parents, and Elena's face had done something complicated and pleased and terrified all at once. And eleven months later, there had been a woman named Sara standing in the Marchettis' kitchen with a suitcase and a decade of unfinished marriage, and two weeks after that there had been a check on the counter and a very kind, very final conversation about transitions. And Lucy had packed four years into six boxes and left without getting to say goodbye to Josie's spelling bee, which she had already promised to attend.

She still remembered the drive home that last day with the boxes rattling in the trunk every time she took a corner, remembered pulling over on the shoulder of the 9 because she couldn't see the lane markers through the windshield anymore, remembered thinking, absurdly, that she'd left her favorite mixing bowl in that kitchen and would never get it back and crying harder about the bowl than she'd let herself cry about anything else, because the bowl was a safe thing to grieve out loud.

She had told herself in the car that she would not do it again—pour herself, uncounted, into a family that could unmake her with a single conversation behind a closed door. It was not a bitter thought. It was closer to arithmetic. She loved children the way some people loved music, and she had learned the hard way that the adults around those children did not always love her back with the same lack of an exit strategy.

"Fair," Mira said finally, and let it go, which was its own small mercy.

"Fair," Anjali echoed, and reached over to squeeze Lucy's hand once, briefly, before letting her get back to stealing fries in peace.

They might have stayed there another hour, the three of them, if Lucy's phone hadn't buzzed against the iron tabletop with a number she didn't recognize, area code local, and something in her—some old, practical instinct built by eleven months of unemployment insurance and increasingly creative grocery budgeting—made her answer it instead of letting it ring through.

"This is Lucy Harper."

"Ms. Harper, hello, this is Patricia Voss, from Ashworth Placements. You registered with us back in the spring?" The voice was brisk, pleasant, unmistakably rehearsed, pleasantries trimmed down to their most efficient shape by however many hundreds of these calls had come before this one. "I've got something I think you're going to want to hear, and I'd love five minutes if you have them."

"I have five minutes." Lucy caught Anjali's eye across the table and mouthed agency, and Anjali sat up like a meerkat, instantly and unapologetically eavesdropping.

"Live-in position, full-time, immediate start. One child, age seven. The family lost the mother—the child's mother—about six weeks ago, sudden illness, and the child is now in the legal guardianship of her aunt, who is looking to bring on a nanny as quickly as possible. The aunt has the resources to make this extremely worth your while, Ms. Harper. I mean extremely. We're talking a hundred and forty thousand, full benefits, private housing on the estate, and a signing bonus if you accept within the week."

Lucy heard the number and felt approximately nothing, which surprised her a little, the way it always did when money that size got said out loud to her like it should mean more than it did. What she felt instead was a small, quiet pull in her stomach at the child is now in the legal guardianship of her aunt—at lost the mother—at the picture that assembled itself instantly and without her permission, a seven-year-old somewhere in a house too big for her, learning the particular grammar of being motherless in real time.

"Who's the family?" she asked.

There was the smallest pause, the kind recruiters left when they already knew the name was going to do some work on its own. "The Cole family. The child is Grace Cole. The aunt is Carrington Cole."

Across the table, Mira's wine glass stopped halfway to her mouth.

"Carrington Cole," Anjali repeated, too loudly, drawing a glance from the bench woman who'd already had her afternoon interrupted once by shrieking grass. "Like, Cole Developments Carrington Cole? The one from the Business Journal cover, the one they called—" she dropped her voice into something between awe and dread "The Ice Queen of Phoenix Ridge?"

Lucy held up a hand, still on the phone, still listening. "Sorry… Go on, Ms. Voss."

"I'll be honest with you, since I'd rather you hear it from me than discover it on your first day," Patricia said reluctantly. "Ms. Cole has a reputation. She's exacting. Two nannies were sent through before you—very good candidates, strong references—and neither lasted the week. I'm not telling you this to scare you off. I'm telling you because I think you're exactly the kind of person who could actually manage her, and because that little girl needs someone who's going to manage her, not just survive her. Ms. Cole would like to meet candidates in person before making a final decision. Tomorrow morning, nine o'clock sharp, at the estate in Highland Bluffs. I should mention she does not care for lateness."

"I'm never late," Lucy said, and meant it as fact rather than boast.

"Good. That'll matter more than you'd think." Patricia's voice picked back up its brisk rhythm. "A few practical notes. It's a genuinely live-in role—private cottage on the grounds, not a room down the hall, so you'd have your own space. The child's name is Grace, she's seven, she hasn't spoken more than a handful of words to either of the previous nannies, from what I understand. Ms. Cole works long hours and travels for business, so on paper you'd have a great deal of autonomy with Grace day-to-day. In practice, I gather Ms. Cole likes to be informed of everything, in detail, promptly. That was, if I had to guess, part of what didn't work out for the others."

"What happened to them? The other two."

"One resigned after three days and wouldn't tell me why beyond 'it wasn't a fit.' The other lasted four and told me, verbatim, that she'd rather clean office buildings for less money than sit through one more of Ms. Cole's morning check-ins." A pause, softer. "Ms. Harper, I'll say one more thing, and then I'll let you decide. This is the best money I've placed anyone for in three years doing this job. But if you're only doing the math on the number, don't take it. She'll know in about ten minutes, and it won't go well for either of you. If you're doing the math on the little girl, though—I think you should come."

Lucy looked across the table at Anjali's stricken face, at Mira setting her glass down like it had suddenly gotten too heavy, and thought about a seven-year-old in a household that could apparently afford a hundred and forty thousand dollars a year for a stranger to manage her grief, and no one, evidently, who could simply sit with her instead.

"I'll be there," she said. "Nine o'clock. Thank you."

She ended the call to a silence that lasted exactly as long as it took Mira to suck in a sharp breath through her teeth.