Page 86 of The Billionaire’s Nanny

Lucy didn't tell her to stop.

"I went out to Deborah Mensah's house on Sunday afternoon. I apologized to her for the funeral, and for the envelopes, and for two years of not calling my sister."

"You apologized?" Lucy said.

"I practiced it out loud in the car the whole way down the coast, and she caught on and asked me to my face if it was scripted.”

Lucy laughed at that, one sound, and put her hand flat against her own cheek and left it there.

"She's writing to Family Services to take her statement back. I didn't ask her to and I'd have gone whether she did or not."

"You told me to keep that gate shut on her. So don't stand out here and tell me you went and sat in her chair."

"You told me she hadn't done anything wrong." Carrington made herself keep her eyes where they were. "I told you I knew that, but I gave you the instruction to shut her out anyway.”

Lucy didn't say anything to that at all. Bettina hadn't moved in the car.

"One night in that study," Carrington said, "I told you that you could take those pages out of this house and mail them to the Tribune, and not one clause in them would protect me."

"I remember what I said back."

"You said you'd never do it. That was never what frightened me." She pushed her hands down into her pockets. "Ashgrove closes this month. Until it does, my name is in that paper every other week."

"So?"

"So if it would help you, I'll call them myself and give them the whole story."

"Help me how?" Lucy said.

"I'll still do it if you ask me to."

"I'm not going to ask you to."

"No," Carrington said. "I didn't think you would."

She stopped there and then went on anyway.

"The first thing that girl ever knew about me came from a newspaper. She stood at her mother's funeral with both hands behind her back so she wouldn't have to shake mine, and she told me I was the aunt from the news. That's all of me she had. I'd like one page of it to be true."

"Don't do that to yourself for me."

"Ten minutes ago, I offered you Grace every other Saturday." Carrington waited until Lucy looked up. “I told you that you wouldn't have to see me.”

"You stopped halfway through."

"I stopped talking too late. That's the second arrangement I've built for you. The first one was about the lease." She took a breath and let it out. "I don't want to arrange anything."

The engine ticked as it cooled.

Lucy leaned in through the open door and pressed the dome light off with her thumb. Then she shut the door, and the sound came back off the front of the house.

"Bettina," Lucy said. "Go home."

"Ms. Cole?"

"Go home," Carrington said.

Bettina started the car. She came around the fountain slowly, stopped next to Lucy, and put the window down again.