Page 12 of The Billionaire’s Nanny

Carrington was quiet long enough that Lucy heard the desk clock tick through four full seconds.

"I'll call Diane Bell tonight." Carrington's voice had gone into the register Lucy recognized from the first interview, cool and procedural, the sound of a woman building a folder in real time. "We'll need documentation. School attendance, medical records, a statement from you regarding Grace's routine and progress. If they want to see stability, I can produce stability. I have produced stability for board members who wanted to see it far more skeptically than a caseworker will."

"That's not what I mean, and I think you know it isn't." Lucy stepped further into the room, close enough now that she could see the fine tension along Carrington's jaw, the place where the woman held everything she wasn't willing to say. "You can't paper this. A caseworker isn't a board. She's going to watch how you look at Grace across a table. She's going to notice if you know what Grace's favorite color is or whether you have to ask me. Documentation proves you paid for things. It doesn't prove you know her."

"Then tell me what does." It came out sharper than anything Carrington had said yet, close to raw, and Lucy understood—with a small, unwelcome lurch somewhere under her ribs—that she had just watched Carrington Cole ask an honest question with no leverage attached to it, possibly for the first time since Lucy had met her.

"You show up," Lucy said. "Not for the interview. Before it. This week, next week, however long we have before that letter arrives. You eat every dinner you can. You do bedtime more than twice. You learn her favorite color, and you learn it because you asked her, not because I told you." She held Carrington's gaze, steady, the way she'd learned to hold it across a desk five weeks ago. "And I'll do everything I can on my end; I'll be there for the interview if they want me, I'll say whatever's true, because it is true, that Grace is loved in this house. But I can't be the only evidence of it. If I am, that report writes itself, and it doesn't end well for you."

Something shifted in Carrington's face, not surrender, nothing so complete as that, but a door opening a few careful inches. "You'd do that. Sit through an interview. Vouch for this household, knowing what it could cost you if it goes badly."

"I'd do it for Grace," Lucy said plainly, because it was true, and because saying it plainly was safer than examining the second half of the sentence too closely, the part that whispered and for you, which she had no intention of handing over tonight, or possibly ever. "This is still a job to me, Ms. Cole. I want to be clear about that. Whatever gets asked of me here, I'm doing it because a seven-year-old needs the ground to hold, not because I've forgotten what my actual role is in this house."

She believed it when she said it. She had been saying some version of it to herself every night for five weeks, in the quiet of the cottage, a small private discipline. This is a job, she is not your child, none of this belongs to you. It had held up fine until roughly the moment Carrington looked at her like that, like Lucy's word was the only ground under her own feet worth trusting tonight.

"Noted," Carrington said, and there was something almost gentle buried under the word, unfamiliar in her mouth. "For what it's worth, I don't think of you as staff who happens to also be kind to my niece, Ms. Harper. I know I've called you that. I was wrong to."

Lucy didn't have an answer ready for that, which almost never happened to her, and the silence that followed had a different texture than the one before it—warmer, more dangerous, the kind she'd have called off in another house with another employer and found herself, here, with no particular urge to.

The desk phone rang before either of them had to decide what to do with it.

Carrington answered on the second ring, out of old habit, already half turned toward the window. "Cole." A pause, her spine straightening by degrees Lucy could actually track. "Yes. Speaking." Another pause, longer, and Lucy watched every trace of the last thirty seconds drain out of Carrington's face and get replaced with something colder, more controlled, armor sliding back into place plate by plate.

"I see." Carrington's eyes found Lucy's across the room and held there. "And there's no flexibility on that timeline."

Whatever the voice on the other end said, it made Carrington go very still.

"This Friday," she repeated, and set the phone down without saying goodbye.

7

CARRINGTON

Carrington hung up the phone and crossed straight to the desk console without sitting down, pulling up the week's calendar and beginning to delete things with the swift, unsentimental efficiency she usually reserved for underperforming subsidiaries.

Tuesday's dinner with the Ashgrove partners—moved. Wednesday's call with the Tokyo office—delegated to Anjalinka, who would be furious and would do it competently anyway, which was the only combination Carrington had ever required from anyone. Thursday's board prep session, the one she'd blocked out three weeks ago in ink rather than pencil because it mattered… She stared at that one longer than the others before she struck it out too.

She buzzed Nadia at eleven at night, which she almost never did, and Nadia picked up on the second ring with the flat, alert voice of someone trained to sound as though she hadn't been asleep at all.

"I need the week cleared," Carrington said. "Everything after five p.m., starting tomorrow. Move what can move. Cancel what can't."

There was a pause on the line, brief enough that anyone else would have missed it, long enough that Carrington heard it anyway. "Cancel entirely? Including Ashgrove?"

"Including Ashgrove."

"They've been asking for that dinner for a month, Ms. Cole."

"Then they can ask for another month." Carrington's eyes moved to the study door, to the dark hallway beyond it and the staircase Grace had once perched on, listening. "There's a home visit at the end of the week. Family Services. I intend to be prepared for it, and preparation isn't going to happen between conference calls."

Another pause, shorter this time, and something in Nadia's voice shifted when she spoke again—not surprise exactly, but the careful recalibration of a woman updating a mental file she'd kept on her employer for six years without ever expecting a new entry. "I'll have it done by morning."

"Thank you. That's all."

Carrington set the phone down and stood in the study a moment longer, feeling the shape of what she'd just done settle over her like a coat that didn't quite fit yet. She had rearranged her calendar around crises before—a hostile bid, a factory fire in Nevada, the year the whole company's insurance had nearly collapsed under a lawsuit she still wasn't permitted to discuss. She had never rearranged it around a seven-year-old's bedtime, and the fact that it required exactly the same muscles unsettled her more than she was willing to examine directly.

She resented it. She let herself feel that plainly, alone in the study, because there was no one there to see her feel it and be disappointed by the pettiness of it. She had built thirty years of a life on the principle that she needed no one, that every dependency was a door someone else could later close on her fingers, and here she was clearing a week for a caseworker's convenience because she had failed, in five weeks, to learn her own niece's favorite color.

She resented it, and she did it anyway, and some small clinical part of her noted that the second fact rather undercut the first.