Page 7 of The Billionaire’s Nanny

"So, I have the job?"

"You have the job." Carrington said it the way she'd have said it to a contractor, flat and procedural, stripping every trace of warmth from a decision that had, if she was being scrupulously honest with herself, very little to do with logistics at all. "Monday. Eight a.m. Nadia will have the cottage prepared and the employment paperwork ready for your signature. I expect daily updates on Grace's state of mind, in writing, and I expect to be informed before any decision is made regarding her routine, her health, or her schooling, not after."

"Understood."

"I don't expect agreement on every point, Ms. Harper. Clearly." A note of something almost like humor moved through the words before Carrington could stop it, dry and unfamiliar in her own mouth. "But I do expect to be informed. That's not negotiable, whatever else is."

"I can work with that."

Carrington rose, which was the signal that the meeting had ended, Lucy rose with her, and for a moment the two of them stood on either side of the desk with the whole glass wall of the city behind Carrington's shoulder and nothing at all resolved between them except the single fact that one of them had gotten a job and the other had, without entirely meaning to, acquired something considerably more complicated than an obedient nanny.

"Nadia will see you out," Carrington said. "I'll expect you Monday."

Lucy nodded once, turned toward the door, and stopped, just short of the threshold, glancing back with an expression Carrington couldn't immediately categorize, something between curiosity and challenge.

"Ms. Cole." A beat. "You should know I saw her on the stairs. Before you did, I think."

Carrington's jaw tightened, caught out in the one thing she'd assumed, wrongly, was hers alone to have noticed.

"That’ll be all, Ms. Harper."

4

LUCY

The box in Lucy's arms said KITCHEN in marker on three sides, and it had started raining somewhere around the second transfer, so she was jogging the last stretch of gravel path when Nadia appeared at the cottage door holding a laminated sheet like she'd been standing there waiting for the exact moment Lucy's hands were full.

"Ms. Cole asked me to go over the household protocols before you unpack," Nadia said, and held the door instead of taking the box, which Lucy understood immediately as its own kind of information.

"Can it wait until I'm not dripping on the floorboards?"

"It'll only take a moment." Nadia's smile was genuine and apologetic in roughly equal measure, a woman clearly used to delivering things she hadn't written. "Deliveries come Tuesdays and Fridays. The kitchen in the main house is stocked according to Grace's meal plan, which you'll find in the blue binder on the counter. Laundry is collected from the cottage porch by nine a.m. or it waits until the next cycle. Ms. Cole would like to be copied on any appointment made for Grace before it's confirmed, not after, and she's asked that you keep a written log of Grace's, ah—" Nadia paused, choosing the word with visible care "—emotional temperature. Daily."

Lucy set the box down on the porch step, finally, and let the rain finish soaking through the shoulder of her jacket. "Emotional temperature?"

"Her words."

"Of course they were."

She'd told herself that she wasn't going to let the first day set the tone for the whole job. She'd been wrong about people's first impressions before—Elena Marchetti had cried during Lucy's interview and turned out to be the kind of mother who forgot her own daughter's birthday twice—but standing in the wet with a stranger's laminated rules in her hand, Lucy felt something settle into place that she suspected wasn't going to move much over the coming months. This house ran on documentation. It had a binder for breakfast.

The cottage itself, when she finally got inside it, was lovely in the specific, empty way of a hotel suite nobody had checked into yet—white walls, a gray sectional angled just so, art that matched the trim instead of anything a person had chosen because they loved it. Lucy set her boxes down in the middle of the living room and stood there a moment, listening to nothing. No creak of an old radiator, no upstairs neighbor's television through the floor. Just the silence of money.

She missed her one window room for roughly four seconds after unlocking this door, and then she made herself stop missing it, because self-pity wasn't going to get her through this transition.

She met Grace properly—not from across a study, not from the top of a staircase—on her second morning, in the kitchen of the main house, where a woman in chef's whites was already plating something with the studied precision of a restaurant expo line.

"Good morning, Grace." Lucy kept her voice easy, unhurried, the register she used on children who'd learned that adults' attention usually came with strings attached. "I'm Lucy."

Grace didn't answer. She sat at the enormous marble island in a school uniform that looked freshly pressed, and she ate her egg white omelet in small, mechanical bites, eyes on her plate, the posture of someone who had learned that the fastest way through breakfast was silence.

"That tasty?" Lucy nodded at the omelet. "Looks good."

Nothing. Not rude—Grace wasn't rude, not once in those first days—just absent, a door closed so gently there wasn't even a sound of the latch.

Lucy didn't push. She'd learned that lesson with harder cases than this one: you didn't win a scared child over by wanting it visibly enough for them to see you wanting it. You won them over sideways, by being there so consistently and so unremarkably that eventually they forgot to keep guarding the door.

So, she showed up. Every morning, every afternoon pickup, every evening in the doorway of Grace's room with a stack of school folders that needed signing and a version of herself that asked for nothing back.