Page 76 of The Billionaire’s Nanny

Mira had her hands folded together in front of her, one thumb working at the other. "I said a thing to you on the phone when you were at the coast," Mira said. "About rich women and their coats."

"I remember it."

Mira opened her mouth and shut it again. "I'm not doing that," she said. "I've sat on this mattress for an hour deciding not to do it, and I'd like it on the record that it's costing me."

"You'd have been right," Lucy said.

"I'd have been right about a coat." Mira unfolded her hands. "That's not the same thing as being right. You sat in front of a stranger with a form and told her the truth about yourself. I've known you since we were nineteen and you've never done it once, and it took a woman with a clipboard to get it out of you."

"It cost the girl her nanny."

"It cost you the job," Mira said.

Anjali reached over and straightened one of the containers on the drawers so that it lined up with the other one. "What do you want to happen?"

Lucy had an answer ready for that. She'd put it together on the second night and gone over it plenty of times since, and every word of it was about Carrington, and none of it came out of her mouth.

Lucy's hands were still flat on her legs with the elastic caught under one of them. Four of those boxes had been shut since the morning she taped them, and in fifteen days she had not wanted one thing out of them.

"I can go the rest of my life without seeing that woman again," Lucy said. "It's Grace. I want to still see Grace.”

27

CARRINGTON

It was a small house that had been white once. The yards on that street ran into each other without fences, so Carrington couldn't tell where one of them stopped. Somebody up the block had left a mower standing in the middle of the grass. Deborah Mensah's car was in the driveway with its hood pointed at the road and no room behind it. Carrington left hers at the curb and turned the engine off.

She had dialed her sister's oldest friend at two in the morning on Wednesday and nobody picked up. At seven, Deborah called back and said to meet on Sunday at four. She was off the line before Carrington could agree to it.

Now, she pressed the doorbell, a brass button with paint dried in the ring around it. Deborah opened the door with her glasses up in her hair.

"Come in."

There was no hall. Two steps and she stood in the room itself, on a mat, with her coat still on. Nowhere to set anything down, and she hadn't brought anything anyway.

"That's the good chair," Deborah said. "The other's mine."

Carrington sat in it. She had to stoop lower than she expected and she had to put a hand on the arm going down. Deborah went out to the kitchen, ran the water, and came back with two glasses. She put a coaster at Carrington's side and the glass on top of it and took her own chair.

Somebody had added on to the room more than once, and nothing in it matched anything else, and nobody had ever tried to make it match. On the wall behind Deborah's head was a photograph from the private room at the Wren Hotel. A cake going past in somebody's hands. A girl of four in a paper crown. Clara at the end of the table with her mouth open in the middle of a word. Carrington had already left by the time that cake came out.

"Thank you for the time," she said.

Deborah drank some of her water.

"I've come to offer you something, and I'd like to say all of it before you answer." Carrington had her hands flat on her knees. "Every other weekend, Friday evening to Sunday, at your house or at mine, whichever suits Grace. A key to the gate and the courtyard door, so that you have access when you’d like."

Deborah didn't interrupt her once. When Carrington stopped, she turned her glass a quarter turn on the arm of the chair and left it there.

"I called that house in March," she said. "I gave a woman my name and my number and I said the number twice so she'd have it down right. Nobody called me back. And now you've driven out here on a Sunday with a key."

"Yes."

"You've never been to this house."

"No."

Deborah nodded.