Page 28 of The Billionaire’s Nanny

Then Grace looked out at the room. She skipped the front row, and she searched along the fourth row, past the woman in the work jacket and the other woman with the phone, until she found Carrington. Then she stopped.

Carrington looked back at her and didn't move.

Grace held the look far longer than a seven-year-old should have been able to. The aide at the end of the riser started walking forward, then thought better of it. Nobody clapped, then Grace stepped back into the line. The next moment, the boy beside her announced that a group of crows was called a murder, and two hundred people let their breath out on that instead.

Lucy's face had been wet since Grace stepped onto the tape. She never wiped it. Lucy turned her head. Carrington stared at the floor between her shoes, and she stayed that way through the last four children in the third grade.

The fourth grade climbed the side steps and worked through facts about the solar system. The fifth grade followed, and they had been told to project, which they did. Renata thanked everybody for coming out on a Friday and announced that the picnic sheet would circulate in the lot. Two hundred people stood up at once and started hunting for their coats.

Carrington stood. She lifted her bag off the floor and then stayed exactly where she was, people pushing past her on both sides. Lucy stood beside her. Neither of them said one word until the row in front had cleared.

It took eleven minutes to empty the multipurpose room. Two hundred people had to funnel back down one corridor past the trophy case, and somebody's toddler had sat down in the middle of it. Carrington moved through them without appearing to touch anybody. Lucy came out four people behind her, into the light and the cold and the diesel smell of the buses.

The lot behind the school was a strip of asphalt between the building and a chain-link fence, and by nearly ten, so many people were milling around that nobody could get out of the parking lot. Renata brought the third grade out for ten minutes before she took them back inside. She stood by the door with the clipboard against her chest and let the children find their families.

Grace came out with Kayla. Kayla's mother collected Kayla off the step, and the two girls stood a foot apart without saying goodbye, then walked away in opposite directions.

Grace found them by the fence and started talking before she reached them. She informed them that the boy had talked about the Titanic, even though they'd told him twice at practice to skip the iceberg. How a girl in the second grade cried at the door and then went up and said hers with her face still wet. How the tape on the floor was the same tape they used in gym, and you were supposed to get your toes on it and not over it, and hers had been half off the whole time and nobody said one word to her about it.

"And that was the right count," Carrington said.

"I know," Grace said.

"Kayla's got the ocean book," Grace said to Lucy. "Kayla says I can bring it home, but her mom says not until Kayla's done with it, and she's never going to be done with it because she keeps going back to the whales."

A woman in a fleece and a lanyard with a laminated card in it walked down the line of cars with a clipboard on her hip and a pen behind her ear, talking to three families every minute, rushing before everyone left.

"Grace Cole," the woman said, finding the name on her sheet. She turned the clipboard around and held out the pen. "Both parents' names, then whatever you're bringing to the picnic. Anything but brownies. I've got nine brownies."

Lucy took the pen. She wrote Lucy Harper on the first line and Carrington Cole beneath it, and in the column marked bringing, she wrote fruit.

Carrington stood a foot away, watched her write it, and said nothing at all.

"Great," the woman said, taking the board back, already turned toward the next car. "The twenty-fourth, eleven o'clock, the shelter with the roof."

"Thank you," Carrington said.

"Are we bringing fruit?" Grace asked.

"I guess we're bringing fruit," Lucy said.

"Okay," Grace said.

Renata raised two fingers at the door. The third grade took about forty seconds to decide to obey her, then drifted over.

"Go on," Lucy said. "Your lunch is in the blue bag."

"I know," Grace said. "Bye." She said it to both of them at once, without deciding which of them to look at, and went.

Renata counted them through the door and raised the clipboard at Lucy over their heads. Then they were all inside and the door shut.

Carrington's car had waited at the curb the whole time with a driver in it and the engine running. Ten past ten.

"I'll have her home at four," Lucy said.

"Thank you, Ms. Harper," Carrington said, and climbed into the car.

Lucy stayed where she was. Two cars down, the woman in the fleece asked somebody else for both parents' names.