Page 49 of The Billionaire’s Nanny

"Oh, that isn't a required field. Just skip it," Carrington said.

From the pantry, the chef shut off the tap.

"All right."

"I have the meeting at seven forty, and Agatha's already there." Carrington straightened the strap on her shoulder. "Thank you, Ms. Harper."

She went out through the courtyard door and pulled it shut, and Lucy stood there until she couldn't hear the car anymore. She picked up the pen and stood there with it.

In two days, Lucy and Carrington hadn’t been in a room together alone at all. Yesterday, she had put a hot dish down in front of Carrington, walked away, then came back and taken the plate away forty minutes later to clean it.

I'm sorry about Tuesday. Four words. They didn't have to be said well. Lucy would have taken them muttered from the doorway with the car running.

Guardian's designee was true and would fill the line. Or she could leave it blank and let the office on Wells Street call the house and ask whoever answered.

She wrote nanny, signed under it, dated it, and straightened the two pages together on the counter. Then she took the milk out and set a pot on the stove to make cinnamon oatmeal. A few minutes later, Grace came in with her shoes on and one sock down.

"Is she gone?" Grace asked.

"Just a bit ago. Sit up here and I'll fix your sock."

Lucy was wiping down the island at half past three when the main gate buzzed.

Grace was upstairs getting out of her school clothes, which took her eleven minutes on a good day. Lucy had the handset off the wall by the second buzz.

"Hello."

"My name's Deborah Mensah." She had a low, unhurried voice, a good deal older than Lucy's. "I was a friend of Clara's. I know I should have called first, but I have a box in my car that belongs to Grace."

On the little screen, a woman stood at the call box in a canvas jacket with her keys in her fist, chin up at the camera, not smiling at it.

"Ms. Cole isn't here."

"I didn't think she would be."

Lucy went back over the words, looking for the edge in them and couldn't find one. She pressed the button and the wrought-iron gates slowly opened.

Grace was standing on the stairs when she turned around, four steps up with her arms around her knees.

"That's a friend of your mom's," Lucy said. "She's coming up the driveway."

They went out to the courtyard door together. She stopped short of the fountain and left the engine running and got halfway out, then said something to herself, sat back in and shut it off. She came around the hood with a cardboard box on her hip.

She was somewhere in her fifties, her hair gray at the front and dark everywhere else, with reading glasses pushed up into her hair and a bandage around one thumb.

"Deborah," she said, and put out the hand without the bandage.

"Lucy Harper. Come inside."

"I know it. Diane Bell told me they'd found somebody good." Deborah shifted the box onto her other hip and looked past Lucy's shoulder. "Hello, Grace."

Grace didn't answer.

"You got tall."

Grace stayed where she was, half behind Lucy's arm, and kept looking at her. Deborah didn't fill the silence. That was the first thing Lucy liked about her.

Then Grace came out from behind her arm. "What's in it?"