Page 59 of The Billionaire’s Nanny

Grace laughed at that, once, with her mouth open.

Nothing went wrong that day. School, pickup, a load of laundry, and half an hour at the kitchen table with a worksheet about the water cycle and an argument about whether clouds counted as weather or as scenery. Carrington got home at ten to six and ate with Grace at the courtyard table, and Lucy stood at the counter with a dish towel and watched the two of them through the glass. Carrington said something and Grace answered her. Carrington said something else and Grace answered that too. From the kitchen, it looked like a household that was doing fine.

Grace went to bed at half past eight, like usual, after the full routine: two pages read aloud and the closet latched. Lucy was on the path back to the cottage by a quarter to nine.

At nine, she opened the logbook at the table and picked up the pencil.

Slept through. Ate her dinner, all of it. Worksheet finished before six. Talked the whole way to school.

She read what she had written, then wrote:

Grace called me Ms. Harper today and I didn’t correct her.

She read it twice, then closed the logbook.

On Wednesday morning, the social worker was going to sit at the marble counter with a folder open and turn these pages one at a time, reading in between the lines. Lucy wanted her to read this page. She wanted one person in the world to open that book and find out what was going on in this house, and she wanted it badly enough that she sat with her hand flat on the notebook and didn’t move.

Then she opened up to the page and erased the final sentence until there was nothing left of it but a gray smear and where the pencil had left grooves from pressing into the paper. Then she brushed the crumbs off the page and blew the rest away before closing the book again.

21

CARRINGTON

"She's seven. She's in third grade, and her teacher is Renata Ford. Ms. Ford teaches three days a week and runs the counseling office the other two," Carrington said to the empty room.

She stopped and said it again without the second half. Melinda Alvarez, the social worker, hadn’t asked about Grace’s teachers in March. Caseworkers notice when you offer extra details they didn't ask for.

"She's seven. Third grade. Her teacher is Renata Ford."

Better. The only light on in the study was the desk lamp, and the courtyard past the glass was pitch black. She had come in here at nine to do this and had been doing it for an hour. Her mouth had gone dry enough that she kept having to start the longer answers twice. She had started sitting down and finished on her feet. It had taken her the first twenty minutes to stop hearing how strange she sounded.

"She goes to bed at half past eight, and she sleeps through the night. She eats dinner at six, and on Saturdays she makes pancakes for breakfast and cracks the eggs into the bowl herself."

She cut that. Nobody would ask about pancakes either. She had included those details to be liked.

The copy of the household list was on the mat in front of her: Carrington Cole, owner, main house; Grace Cole, minor, main house; Lucy Harper, live-in nanny, cottage. All true information. The original had gone back to Diane on Monday of last week.

"Ms. Harper has been with us since February. She lives in the cottage. She's off at seven and every other weekend."

True as well.

"The cottage has one room and a bathroom. You're welcome to look at it."

Carrington knew Melinda Alvarez would look at it. She had walked down there in March as well. This time, she would find the small tells of a woman who lived in the space daily: a coat on the hook by the door, clothes in the hamper, the logbook on the table.

"Is your relationship with Ms. Harper personal in any way?" Carrington said it in Alvarez's voice, flat and unhurried, the way a woman asks a question she has asked forty times that month.

"No," Carrington said smoothly. There was nothing in her voice that would betray her. She said it twice more and it sounded the same both times. It would also all have to be true for the rest of the year because the file didn’t officially close until January. And when Melinda Alvarez asked Lucy the same set of questions, Carrington had to trust her to do what was best for Grace.

Any other problem in Carrington’s life would have been splayed open in a pros and cons list, but she knew there was nothing about this one that she could put in writing without it potentially getting leaked. Carrington shut the lamp off and sat in the dark for a minute before standing up.

The form for the aquarium field trip was on the hall table where Lucy had left it, filled in, the permission box ticked and the emergency number written out in full. Carrington uncapped the pen and signed it before going back upstairs.

From the landing window she could see the entire path, and the cottage light was on behind the curtain. She stood at the glass and looked at it, wondering what Lucy was doing alone in there. Eventually, she went to her room and removed her hair pins one by one, methodically, placing them in the small dish on the nightstand. After, she got under the covers and lay on her side. She hadn’t gone to bed before midnight since the day Diane Bell called about the letter.

At eleven, somebody opened her bedroom door.

Grace stood in the gap, barefoot, in pajamas that dragged on the floor. "Are you awake?"