Page 20 of The Billionaire’s Nanny

Grace turned her head. "You don't know?"

"No."

"Okay," Grace said, and went back to the water.

They stayed like that, both of them on either side of Grace, until Grace said the fish had moved and nobody could find it again.

The wind came off the cove, and Lucy pushed her hair out of her face with her wet hand and got salt in her mouth. Fifty feet up, the lodge sat on the shoulder of the headland with all its glass reflecting the same gray as the sky. Carrington had her sleeves shoved up and her forearms braced on her knees. Her lips moved a little while soundlessly while counting, and she got to the end of the pool and started again at the far side, checking herself. Lucy watched her do it until Carrington had started over and then had to look somewhere else.

Breakfast was at eight, at the long table in front of the window. Grace talked straight through it, with her mouth full. She animatedly shared about the anemone that might be orange and how it had been sort of orange and sort of brown, and whether that was two different kinds or one kind that had gotten dirty. That crabs walk sideways and hers had walked forward, which meant hers was either broken or a different animal. Whether the fish under the ledge was a baby of a big fish or a whole grown fish that had stayed small. She talked about her friend Kayla at school who had a book about the ocean, but it was mostly whales. She wanted to know if whales came here. She ate two triangles of toast and left the crusts in a stack, then started on a third.

Lucy sat on Grace's left side with her hands around a cup of coffee she'd already finished, and every so often she said mm or probably and Grace kept going.

"When can we do the other ones?" Grace said.

Carrington put her pen down. "Which other ones?"

"You said there are ones under the shelf. On the left." Grace pointed out the window, in more or less the wrong direction. "We didn't go there."

"You'd need a lower tide than we had this morning," Carrington said. "I can’t control that."

"Oh," Grace said.

"There'll be one," Carrington said. "I don't know when I'll be able to bring you back for it."

Grace picked her toast back up and bit the corner off it.

Lucy pressed her thumb hard into the handle of the empty cup. Across the table, Carrington slid the top page out from under her pen and turned it over.

"Nineteen," she said, writing. "And one that may or may not be orange. One crab. One fish, unidentified."

She tore the strip off the bottom of the page, along the edge of what she'd written, and held it out across the table. Grace looked at it. Then she took it and folded it in half and folded it again and put it in her coat pocket. Carrington picked up the rest of the page and went back to whatever the rest of the page was.

Lucy got up and carried her empty cup six feet to the sideboard and stood with her back to the table, hands flat on the wood, until she could stop smiling.

The car came at eleven and they were in the air a little after noon. Within ten minutes, Grace was asleep. She cradled the rabbit under her chin, and her mouth was open and she had one boot off. Lucy put a blanket over her and then sat with her hand on the armrest doing nothing at all. Once, somewhere in the middle of the flight, Grace awoke halfway out of her slumber and said the fish had probably gone back under the ledge by now. Lucy said that was where she'd have gone, and Grace was out again before she finished the end of the sentence.

Carrington had the same stack of papers she'd torn Grace's list out of at breakfast, and she didn't turn a page the whole first hour.

Then Devika came up the aisle with two folders. She was the acquisitions counsel, and she was younger than Lucy had expected the first time somebody said counsel. Devika was already talking before she got to them, about the eastern parcel and the announcement and whether the signing could still happen Thursday.

"Ms. Harper, would you mind?" Devika said. "It's just easier if I'm across from Ms. Cole."

Lucy took her bag and moved back a row, next to Grace, and Devika sat down where she'd been.

"Thursday, then," Devika said. "There's a dinner after the signing, if you want me to hold a room."

"Ms. Harper." Carrington didn't turn around. "What's Thursday?"

Lucy leaned out into the aisle so she could be heard over the engines. "Reading night. And Grace has a line to learn for the assembly."

"A line," Carrington said.

"One line," Lucy said. "Her teacher put the whole class on the program."

"No dinner," Carrington said.

Devika wrote it down, cheerful about it, and said, "of course, Ms. Cole," and went straight on to the next thing.