Page 34 of The Billionaire’s Nanny

On Friday, a van came at half past five.

The gate motor started when she was thirty feet down the path with her shoes in her hand. She stepped sideways into the hedge. It was clipped flat on the outside and nothing but wet sticks on the inside, and she wedged in as far as her shoulder and stopped there, one bare foot still on the gravel, standing in a bush at half past five in the morning like a teenager.

The driver came around the hedge with the first crate on her hip and set it down on the kitchen step. Then the range light came on across the courtyard.

"You're early," the chef said.

"I've got the whole ridge before eight," the driver said.

They stood there talking about the driver's sister for a minute and a half. Lucy's arm went dead against the branches and the cold came up through the bare foot she had on the gravel. She clamped her free hand over her mouth and held it there until the door shut behind them. She was going to laugh.

She let herself into the cottage at twenty to six with wet sticks down the front of her shirt and a scrape along her forearm she would have to explain to Grace at breakfast. She put the coffee on. Then she reset the alarm for a quarter past five and showered.

Grace started reading to her on Tuesday.

Kayla had finished with the ocean book at last and sent it home in Grace's bag. It stayed against the base of the lamp on the nightstand for two days without being opened. Grace wanted to finish the fox book first, and she wanted to read it herself. All of it, out loud, without help on the words.

"You can say it if I get stuck for a long time," Grace said. "Not right away."

"How long is a long time?" Lucy asked.

Grace thought about that. "Longer than you waited when I got stuck on rescue."

So Lucy sat on the end of the bed with her hands under her thighs and let Grace work through a paragraph and a half about the weather. Grace read slowly and flatly and got everything right, and then Grace came to the part where the fox talks to the light, and she did a voice for it.

It was terrible. Grace pushed her chin down into her neck to get it low and gravelly, held it for four words, then lost it and had to push her chin down again on the next line.

"That's not what she sounds like," Grace said.

"What does she sound like?" Lucy asked.

"Not like that," Grace said, and did it again anyway, worse, and kept reading to the bottom of the page.

Lucy pulled her hands out from under her thighs and put them flat on the blanket instead. Twice, Grace stopped on a word, and Lucy counted to five in her head, and Grace worked it out on her own both times.

"Twenty-two pages," Grace said, when she shut it. "That's four more nights. Maybe three."

"Three if you keep going like that," Lucy said.

"Will you be here when I finish it?" Grace asked.

"Yes," Lucy said.

"Okay," Grace said. She put the book back on the nightstand and put the ocean book on top of it.

The picnic was on Saturday, at eleven, at the shelter with the roof.

Lucy cut fruit into a plastic tray at half past nine and covered it and drove Grace over. Carrington came in her own car and arrived nine minutes later. Sixty-odd families crowded under and around the shelter. Kayla's mothers had brought two coolers and a folding table nobody had asked them to bring, and somebody's grandmother ran a bean bag game on the grass for an hour without ever once explaining the rules.

The woman in the fleece from the school lot came around with the clipboard again, checking off what had actually turned up against what people had written down.

"Fruit," she said, finding it on the list. "Nobody else brought any."

"Good, we brought enough," Lucy said.

The woman looked past her at the shelter. "Is Grace's aunt here? I've got her down for the fall committee."

"Ms. Cole is by the tables," Lucy said. "In the gray blazer."