Page 79 of The Billionaire’s Nanny

"Is Grace sick?"

"She's stopped talking."

"How long has it been?"

"Since four days after you left. She does her schoolwork and answers her teacher, but she only answers through writing her replies on paper. She won’t reply verbally." Bettina said it flatly and didn't dress it up. "Nobody called to tell you about it, and I've thought about that plenty. It bothered me. I wanted to come here and tell you myself."

Lucy had a hand on the door frame but didn't remember putting it there. She did the math in her head and figured out it’d been sixteen days since she had left. She'd spent them in a rented room winding an elastic around two fingers, worrying about Grace’s closet door. Meanwhile, that whole time Grace had been going to school and coming home in complete silence.

Bettina took an envelope out of her coat and held it flat in her palm without offering it yet. "She wrote this Tuesday. It's been in her school bag ever since. This morning she gave it to me in the car on the way to school. It’s for you."

The envelope said LUCY on the front in pencil, gone over twice.

"Does Ms. Cole know you're here?" Lucy asked.

"No."

"Then take the envelope back."

Bettina didn't move her hand. "I got your address from the agency. I told them I was calling from the house and they gave me your address so I could come here. So there's that as well."

"Bettina."

"I've worked for that woman for many years, and I've never gone around her back once."

"Then don't start with me." Lucy held the door against her hip. "You take that letter back to the house tonight and you put it on Ms. Cole’s desk and you tell her Grace wrote it. Then it's hers to answer and decide what to do with it. It isn't yours."

"I did think of that."

"And?"

"Ms. Cole would write back." Bettina pressed the envelope against Lucy's chest and held it there until Lucy took it. "She'd sit down and write it well, too. This is yours. It's addressed to you."

"Is Grace eating?"

"You want to know how she is? Go see her," Bettina said. "Read the letter or don't. I'll be in the car waiting."

Lucy looked down at her socked feet. "I can't show up at that house."

"You're holding a letter from a seven-year-old who misses you and you’re telling me about the house." Bettina pulled her coat until it was straight. "I'll wait twenty minutes and then I'll go, and either way, I'm not bringing anything back to her."

She walked back down the path to the car.

Lucy sat down on the second stair with the door open behind her and slipped her thumb under the flap. Grace had folded the page twice. It came out in quarters and wouldn't lie flat, and Lucy had to press it open against her knee.

Dear Lucy.

The lady with the bag came to my school and she asked me who puts me to bed. I said you and Aunt Carrington. Then two days after that you went away. I keep thinking it was because of that. If it was, you can just write it down. You don't have to say no if it is really yes. You don't have to come.

From, Grace.

She read it again. Under the last line, the pencil had gone through the paper, where Grace had started writing something else and erased it without getting all of it. Lucy wanted to know what that line had been.

Lucy got up and found her coat then buttoned the gray rabbit inside it, pulled the front door shut behind her, and got in the car. Bettina drove the coast road with the radio off, and she didn't ask a single question the whole way to the house.

The gates opened. Bettina drove up and stopped short of the fountain.

"Ms. Cole is in the study," Bettina said. "The door's shut."