Page 74 of The Billionaire’s Nanny

Neither one of them had offered her money in years. It had never once occurred to Lucy that not offering took anything out of them.

"Well, you’ve heard all of it now," Lucy said. "I'm eating, I'm sleeping, and I'll be working before the summer's over."

"We're not leaving," Mira said.

"We’re not here about the job," Anjali said.

"Then what?"

"Your text." Anjali had her purse on her knees and her hands on top of it. "It's the same one you sent me four years ago. I went back and found it. Nearly word for word."

Lucy had the elastic out of her pocket without deciding to. She got one turn of it around her fingers, and then her hands quit moving and didn't start again. Downstairs, the landlady turned her program off, which she had not once done in the middle of a morning.

"Her name was Elena," Lucy said.

"I remember her name," Mira said.

"I know you do." She looked at the boxes under the window instead of at either of them. "I loved her."

Anjali's hands stayed where they were on the purse. Mira didn't say a word.

"It started the second month I was there, and it didn't stop until four years later," Lucy said. "I slept in that house every night and not one person knew what I was to her. Not her sister. Not Josie. Not one teacher at that school, and I was in there twice a week."

"Lucy," Anjali said.

"Let me finish." Lucy pushed off the doorframe. "Then Sara came back with her suitcase. Sara was her wife, and I knew that the first week I was in the house."

Mira wasn't moving. "Did she ever say it back?"

Lucy looked at the window for a second before she answered. "In the house," she said. "Never anywhere someone could overhear."

"Two weeks after Sara came, Elena sat me down at the kitchen table and was kind to me for about forty minutes. She used the word transitions. And then she wrote me a check and put it on the counter under the fruit bowl." Lucy pressed both palms down on her own thighs. "I took the check."

Downstairs, the landlady's chair scraped back on the boards. Anjali edged forward on the chair.

"Okay," Anjali said.

"That's it?" Lucy asked.

"We wondered," Anjali said. "Both of us, for years. I never wanted to make you say it out loud."

Lucy had never said that story out loud in her life. She'd expected something in the room to change when it came out. Her ears were hot, and that was all that happened.

"You cried about a bowl," Mira said. “You called me off the shoulder of the highway and cried for twenty minutes about a mixing bowl," Mira said. "And I sat in a parking lot and told you it was a good bowl and you could get another one."

"You did."

"It wasn't about a bowl,” Mira said.

"No," Lucy said.

"I've thought about that phone call maybe a hundred times."

"I know."

"You let me be wrong for four years."

"Yes," Lucy said.