Page 56 of The Billionaire’s Nanny

Carrington looked up at her. "That isn't what we agreed to."

"I know. I'm asking you to change one thing in it."

"She's seven. She repeats everything she hears and not always to me."

"Not this."

"Especially this." Carrington picked the coffee mug up at last, swirled it, and set it down again. "If she hears it one way in here and another way at school, she'll ask which one is right. And she'll ask somebody. I don't get to pick who."

Lucy pushed the pan an inch along the rack and lined it up with the edge and took her time about it. It was the same case Carrington had made upstairs on Saturday night, and Lucy had agreed with it then too.

"Fine," she said.

"Thank you," Carrington said.

The chef came out of the pantry with the flour bin against her hip and put it down on the marble. Lucy set the milk on the stove to warm and got the cinnamon down off the shelf. Behind her, Carrington and the chef planned out the week together.

Grace came downstairs at ten past seven with her shoes already on and her hair loose around her shoulders.

"Sit up here," Lucy said.

Grace climbed onto the stool and planted both elbows on the marble. She looked into the bowl before she started on it. Carrington came back through with her bag on her shoulder and her coat over one arm. She stopped by the stool and put her hand on the back of the chair, not touching Grace.

"I'll be home before dinner," she said.

"Okay,” Grace replied.

"Ms. Harper." Carrington nodded once at her.

Then she let herself out into the courtyard and pulled the door shut. Grace looked up from the bowl at the sound of it, checked Lucy's face, and put another spoonful in her mouth.

Lucy had agreed to this. Nobody had made her. She took the brush off the shelf and ran it through Grace's hair softly.

It was the job she had been hired to do, and none of it had changed. She woke in the cottage instead of in Carrington's bed. She came up the path at six with the light already on the hedge, let herself in at the courtyard door, and nobody who saw her would have thought a thing about it.

That was the part she had not counted on. There was nothing to hide anymore, because there was nothing happening. She had spent April going back down that path at ten to five carrying her shoes, with her pulse in her ears, and this week was easier than any of it, yet she hated every hour.

She called Carrington Ms. Cole in the house, and once in the car by herself, to hear whether it was coming out sounding naturally yet. It was.

At breakfast, she stayed on her feet by the sink while Carrington ate sitting on the stool. Normally, she sat opposite from Carrington every morning and even though nobody had asked her to eat standing up, on Tuesday, she did. By the end of the week, sitting down to eat would have been the strange thing to do.

On Thursday, the chef asked whether Ms. Cole would be in for dinner. Lucy said she would have to check with Nadia. Lucy would have known in April; that was what had hurt. She had known Carrington's whole week then, the dinners and the travel and which nights ran late, and now she found it out the same way the chef did.

At nine every night, she opened the logbook on the table in the cottage and wrote four or five lines about Grace’s day, for a stranger to read on the twentieth. Slept through. Ate. School fine. Every word of it was true, and not one word of it was worth reading. It took eleven minutes. Then she shut the book and left it out on the counter.

Grace did not stop talking throughout the week. She talked in the car, and she came looking for Lucy in the kitchen at half past three with her shoes still on. But she stopped reading the whale book out loud to herself after dinner. Lucy thought nothing much of it. Then on Thursday afternoon, Lucy went up to put a stack of Grace's shirts away, and the end of the windowsill was bare.

Lucy got down on one knee and looked under the bed. The book was back in the cardboard box, laid flat on top of the shoebox with the two rubber bands around it, where Deborah had told her she could leave it for years if that was what she wanted.

Lucy put the shirts in the drawer and pushed it shut with her hip. She left her palm flat on the front of it. Downstairs, she started the potatoes. At dinner she asked Grace about the cartwheel girl and about the aquarium trip in June, and Grace answered both. Lucy purposefully didn’t ask her about the book that was now tucked away in the dark.

On Sunday night, she got Grace into bed at half past eight, read two pages aloud to her, latched the closet door, and was down at the cottage by a quarter to nine.

She wrote the log at the table. Slept through Saturday. Ate a whole plate of the fish. Asked twice about the gate code and I told her twice.

Nobody had asked her to do anything else that day. She lay on the gray sectional with a paperback, reading the same page four times because her mind kept wandering. No radiator ticking, no television through a wall, nothing in the cottage but the refrigerator coming on and going off again. At ten past ten, she got up and put on her shoes again.

The low lights were on down the border of the path, sunk in at ankle height, and the grass between them and the gravel was already wet. Lucy walked up on the grass. The kitchen was dark except for the little bulb over the range. She went through the courtyard door and up the stairs.