Page 72 of The Billionaire’s Nanny

"I'm still here."

At half past eight, Carrington pushed the closet door until it clicked and then turned the handle to make sure. Grace had the whale book under her pillow again, one corner of it pushing the fabric up. The braid had mostly come out during the day, and the elastic was hanging off the end of it.

Carrington read two pages out of the fox book in a neutral voice and voiced the gull badly. At the bottom of the second page, she stopped, halfway through something the fox was saying, and shut the book and put it face down on the nightstand.

The gray rabbit had been up on that pillow beside her head every night since February. Carrington looked at the empty space where it went for a second longer than she meant to.

"Goodnight, Grace," she said.

Grace rolled toward the wall and brought her knees up under the sheet.

Carrington left the door open an inch and went along the landing past her own room. She took the Fenwick Street file down to the study at ten and sat down to work until she felt the pull to sleep.

Nobody had cleaned the room in nearly two weeks because she had told Nadia to keep everybody out of it. The folder from the caseworker's visit was still out beside the lamp, where she had put it down that afternoon and had not opened since, and so was the white envelope with the check to Lucy.

At half past one, she hadn’t written anything for the project, and a half hour later, she abandoned work and picked up the envelope, holding it over the outgoing tray for a second, then opened the desk drawer instead.

The two halves of Lucy’s contract were where she had put them, torn low and uneven, the wider piece on top. Under them was the cream envelope Diane Bell had sent up to the house the week after the funeral. Her own name was across the front, in Clara's handwriting. Still sealed.

She took the letter out, dropped the check in after it, laid the two halves back over the top, and pushed the drawer shut. She slipped her thumb under the corner and tore it open along the top. Inside were two sheets of paper. Her eyes were drawn to the middle of the second page first.

You were never cold. Everybody thinks that and they’re all wrong, including you. You were careful. There's a difference and I'm the only one who ever saw it. Now I’m dying, so you'll have to start telling people yourself.

Carrington went back to the top.

I've started this four times already, so I'm going to stop trying to make it sound nice and just say it like it is.

She skipped down.

Do you remember me sitting in that doorway making you name them? Nine fish and every one of them the same fish. You never once got them right and you never once minded, and I have thought about that more than you would believe. It's the only thing I ever saw you want that you didn't have a reason for. Then Dad made you get rid of the tank when you were fourteen, and you never asked anybody for anything again. You just earned things. Carrington, nobody ever wanted the receipt.

I meant what I said at her birthday and I'd say it again tomorrow. I shouldn't have said it with eleven other mothers in the room. I'm sorry about that part and not one bit sorry about the rest.

She turned back to the first page and read the paragraph she had skipped.

Everybody is going to tell you I picked you because there was nobody else. There is nobody else. But that isn't why. I've been lying here changing my mind about it since they diagnosed me, and I keep coming back to you, all of you, the two years included.

She won't tell you anything straight. She comes at it sideways and you have to let her. Ask her outright and she'll shut the door and you'll get nothing out of her for a week.

Don't be careful with her. Please. You were careful with me and look where it got the two of us.

Carrington laid both sheets on the desk mat. The first sound rose out of her with no warning at all. She clapped her hand over her mouth and stifled it. She folded down over her knees with her forehead against the edge of the desk. Her nose ran, and she swiped it on her wrist. It kept dripping. At some point, she wasn’t sure, her shoulders started shaking and she couldn’t stop them.

It went on for a long time, Carrington doubled over like that as waves of grief racked her body. When it subsided, she stayed down with her arm across the desk and her face on her arm. It was a while before her breathing leveled out.

"Clara," she whispered to nobody.

Then she sat up. Carrington picked up her phone and scrolled down to Deborah Mensah’s name. She stared at the name, then she pressed it.

26

LUCY

The elastic was blue and had a nick in it where something had caught it. Lucy wound it around two fingers, four turns, until the tips of her fingers darkened, and then she let it come loose and wound it again. She had been doing that a while.

She had rented the front room in this house for eleven months before she became Grace’s nanny, and the back one cost the same. The window in here faced the yard, so the light was bright in the morning and all through the afternoon. Her landlady had apologized twice. The room came with a bed, a chest of drawers, and a chair with a broken cane seat she could have fixed in an afternoon. She had lined the six boxes along the wall under the window and opened two of them.

She had sat the gray rabbit up on the nearest closed one with his back against the wall.