Page 47 of The Billionaire’s Nanny

"Both of you come. It's loud. Nobody minds noise down there."

At half past eight, the two girls got permission to go look at the aquarium tank by the front door, and Pilar took Grace by the sleeve and towed her away. A server cleared the plates, pulled the brown paper off the table with them, and carried the crayon jar away. Ines pushed her chair back and pushed one arm into her coat.

"I'll sign in the morning," Ines said. "Sofia will give you the dates."

"There's one problem, and it's the barge," Sofia said. "If it isn't here by the fifteenth, everything scheduled after it moves back a week."

Carrington turned to answer her. "Then we don't wait on it. There are two other barges on this coast, and I'll pay for whichever one is closer."

"Before I forget," Ines said. She had a pen out and one of her own cards turned over on the table. "If you're coming down to watch the crane, I need names for the gate. Nobody gets on that dock who isn't on the sheet." She wrote while she talked. "Carrington Cole. Grace Cole." Then she looked up across the corner of the table. "Lucy what?"

"This is Grace's nanny," Carrington said.

She wanted to stand up and walk out of the building. Nanny. She had said nanny about the woman who came up the stairs behind her on the worst nights and got the pins out of her hair one at a time. Who stood in her kitchen at ten o'clock cooking her eggs because nobody else was ever going to. Who had never once, in four months, asked her for a single word about any of it.

And the worst part was that nobody had asked. Ines had only wanted Lucy’s last name to write on a gate sheet, and Carrington had given her that instead, before anybody made her, because it was the first thing in her mouth and it always had been.

Ines's pen stayed where it was.

Lucy had a crab leg in her fingers and wasn't finished with it. She worked the meat out, laid it on Grace's plate, and put her hands in her lap.

"Harper," she said. "Lucy Harper."

Ines wrote it under the other two.

"The fifteenth is fine either way," Agatha said to Sofia. "I'll write the second barge in as a backup, and you won't be waiting on anybody."

Then the table moved on. Sofia answered her, Ines pulled her collar straight, and everybody went back to work. Carrington sat with both hands flat on the table and nothing left on it to pick up. The butter had dried into the creases of her knuckles and it pulled every time she moved her fingers, so she stopped moving them.

She could say something nice about Lucy now, which was worse. Bosses said nice things about the people who worked for them. She could fix it later, in the car, with nobody listening, but she knew that wouldn’t erase what she had said. So she just sat there and said nothing.

Lucy was four feet away on her left with her hands still in her lap, and Carrington could not make herself turn her head that way. She looked across the room instead. Through the gap between the bar and the front window, she could see the two girls at the tank with their foreheads almost resting against the glass. Pilar was pointing at something down in the bottom of the tank, and Grace had both hands cupped around her eyes to see through the reflection.

The server came back with the check in a plastic tray and set it down by the water glasses. Ines was already on her feet in her coat and she still got a palm flat on the tray before Carrington was halfway there.

"No," Ines said.

"It's a business dinner."

"You didn't pick the restaurant." Ines slid the tray toward herself and put a card in it without looking at the paper. "You can pay for the pilings. That's a bigger check."

Carrington put her hand in her lap. Her rings were still lying beside the water glass.

Grace came back two minutes later at a run, talking before she got to the chair.

"It's not one lobster, it's four," Grace said. "They're all in there together and one of them is sitting on the others. Pilar says that one’s the boss, but I don't think lobsters have a boss. And there's a sign that says pick one, but you can't take it home; they're for eating."

"You can pick one," Lucy said. "Then somebody eats it."

Grace thought about that. "Oh," she said. Then: "I don't want to."

"Then don't."

Lucy pulled Grace's coat off the chair back and held it open, and Grace pushed her arms into the sleeves.

Ines shook Carrington's hand at the door and told her the crew started at seven and to come before nine or not bother. Carrington said she would. By the time they had gone outside, it had already turned cold and the lights were on all the way down the pier. Grace was asleep against Lucy's shoulder before they reached the car.

Lucy got into the back with Grace, and Carrington drove. It was thirty-five minutes to Cliffside on the ridge road and she drove with both hands on the wheel and the radio off. Behind her, in the mirror, Lucy had her arm across Grace to hold her upright during the turns and she was looking out the window at nothing.