Page 17 of The Billionaire’s Nanny

"Oh."

The clock on the nightstand said 10:41. Grace's hair was stuck to one side of her face, and her breathing was still coming high in her chest.

"Are you hurt?"

"No."

"Do you know where you are?"

Grace looked at the window and then at the door, taking inventory of a room she had slept in twice. "Yes."

Carrington turned the lamp on. Grace's whole face winced against it and she put her arm up over her eyes. Carrington turned it off again and stood in the dark she had just made worse.

"Can you tell me what it was about?" Carrington asked.

"No."

"It was a dream. Dreams aren't real."

"I know," Grace said, with the flat, courteous voice from the dinner table.

The closet door stood open about six inches. Carrington crossed the room and pushed it until it caught and turned the handle so the latch seated properly. Grace watched her do it, and nothing in her face changed. Triangles. The green cup. A closet door shut, not ajar. She stood with her hand on the handle a second longer than the job needed and then took it off.

"There's another room at the end of the hall," she said. "The same bed, the same view. We can move you tonight if this one's wrong."

"It's not wrong."

"The car comes at eleven tomorrow. I can move it up to seven and have you home for lunch."

Grace shook her head against the pillow.

The fox book was on the nightstand with a receipt in it for a page marker, spine gone soft, a corner of the cover missing. Carrington picked it up and found the receipt and sat on the edge of the mattress. It was now the routine at home, starting at eight-thirty at home, four nights out of seven. Carrington had done it badly every one of those nights, and Grace had let her.

"Do you want the next bit?"

Grace shut her eyes.

Carrington read the next four lines aloud, hearing her own voice come out of her flat and correct, and she stopped in the middle of the fifth. She put the receipt back where it had been and closed the book and set it down on the nightstand lined up to the edge.

"Would you like me to get Lucy?"

"You said she's in the hall," Grace said.

Carrington went to the door. The hallway was black except for the gray coming out of the room behind her, and Lucy was an amorphous shape against the far wall with her arms folded.

"Ms. Harper."

"I'm right here," Lucy said. She didn’t move or say anything else.

Grace lay down and turned to face the wall with her knees coming up under the sheet. "You can go back to bed. I'm okay now."

Carrington's mouth had gone dry. Nobody was coming. She sat down on the floor with her back against the side of the bed, facing the window, which put her at a considerable disadvantage and out of Grace's line of sight. But she stayed there.

"The tide's out," she said. "You can tell from the sound. When it's in, it's one long noise, and when it's out, you can hear the gaps."

Nothing from the bed.

"There are tide pools down at the bottom of the steps. Under that rock shelf on the left. You have to go at low tide or you don't see anything, so it would have to be early."