Page 18 of The Billionaire’s Nanny

The sheet moved and made a scratching sound.

"When I was your age, I wanted to work on that. Not the pools. The rest of it, further out."

"Doing what?"

"Counting things, mostly, and writing down what I counted." The gull was flying over the water again, the same one that had been working the cove since Tuesday, methodical about it. "I had a fish tank. From when I was six until I was fourteen."

"What was in it?"

"Nine fish. I named them all."

There was a pause with a different quality to it. "What were they called?"

"Barnaby. Edwin. Constance. Mr. Pike, who was not a pike." Carrington had not said any of these words aloud in thirty-five years and her voice did something on the third one. "Alistair. Hugo. I don't remember the last three."

"Those are people names."

"They are."

"Which one was Barnaby?"

"I never knew," Carrington said and smiled. "They were all the same fish. Small and orange with a black bit on the tail. I told your mother I could tell them apart, and she used to sit in the doorway and test me on it. I got it wrong every single time, and she thought that was the funniest thing that had ever happened in our house."

Grace didn't say anything. Carrington kept her eyes on the glass and found the seam between two floorboards with her thumbnail and went along it and back. "Are they still alive?"

"No. They lived about two years. Fish don't live very long."

"All of them?"

"All of them. Some of them I flushed and some of them I buried by the fence. I cried about Constance but not the others, which never made any sense to me, because I couldn't tell which one Constance was."

Grace didn't say anything for a while, and then: "Did you get more?"

"No. I stopped."

"Why?"

"I got busy with other things," Carrington said, which was the truth with all the loaded heaviness taken out of it.

The breathing behind her had come down out of the top of the chest. Carrington waited until it was slow and even, gave it another minute, and put a hand up on the bed to push herself up.

Grace's fist closed on the cuff of Carrington’s sleeve, gathered up in one fist at the wrist, the way you'd hold a rope. Carrington sat back down, leaving her arm up on the bed.

She had put a hand out to her once before. Grace had looked at it and put both of hers behind her back.

The clock now said 11:04. Her phone was on the arm of a chair on the other side of the wall. There was a note to Devika she had been assembling since dinner about the remediation schedule and the three-year structure and whether the eastern parcel should be held back from the announcement, and she got as far as the second clause of it and lost the thread, and started again, and lost it in the same place. After that, she gave up on it and sat in the dark listening to the gaps in the water and doing nothing whatsoever, for the first time she could remember since she was fourteen years old.

The clock said 11:26. Her arm went numb from the shoulder down, hot first and then a complete lack of sensation. Four fingers and a thumb, closed on the cotton. She kept looking at them. Every few minutes, Grace's little hand tightened and let go again, checking, and every time it did, something arced through Carrington's chest.

Somewhere around twelve, Grace’s fist unclenched and stayed open. Carrington waited for the fingers to go slack all the way and then took her arm back an inch at a time. When she stood up, she realized that her foot had gone dead, too, and she put a hand on the wall to steady herself until the sensation of pins and needles passed.

Grace was face-down in the pillow with her mouth open. The closet door was shut. The amber nightlight was plugged into a wall in Cliffside, four hundred miles away, and Carrington stood in the doorway and worked out what it would take to have one here before Grace woke up.

Lucy was sitting on the floor of the hall with her back to the wall and her legs out in front of her, in the T-shirt and the leggings. She had been there the whole time.

"Fifty-one minutes," she said.

"She's asleep." Carrington pulled the door to and left it an inch slightly off the frame, a thing she had learned from Lucy and never mentioned. "You didn't come in."