Page 27 of The Billionaire’s Nanny

Lucy set the phone face down on her knee and left it there. Two rows up, the man with the stroller was still trying to fold it with one hand.

Carrington walked up the aisle at quarter to nine, one clean note at a time on the gym floor over the noise of two hundred people, and a woman two rows ahead turned all the way around in her seat to look at her.

Lucy took her coat off the second chair and put it over her knees. Carrington sat down still wearing her own coat and set her bag upright on the floor between her shoes. She was wearing a gray suit and small gold earrings, and her hair was fixed in an updo. The folding chair she sat down on had a strip of blue tape around one leg and a number stenciled on the back.

"Ms. Harper," Carrington said.

"Ms. Cole," Lucy said.

Up ahead, somebody's grandmother lowered herself into a seat with a cane and a plastic bag of knitting, and the man with the stroller gave up on the aisle and rocked it with his foot against the wall. Two seats down the row, a woman in a sturdy work jacket looked over at Carrington and kept looking a moment past what was considered polite, then said something quickly to the woman next to her. The woman didn't turn around. She pulled her phone out instead and held it low against her knee, face down.

"How is she sleeping? Grace," Carrington asked.

"All the way through," Lucy said. "Every night since Sunday."

Carrington nodded once and faced front, and people kept filling in the room around them.

The woman in front turned around in her chair. "Do you know if they're doing the picnic sheet today?"

"I don't know," Lucy said.

"They always do it out in the lot," the woman said. "So you can't get away." She smiled at Lucy, and then at Carrington, without the smile dimming at all in between, and turned back around.

Carrington sat with her eyes on the strip of tape stuck across the front of the bottom riser. "Has Grace told you her line?"

"No," Lucy said.

"She wouldn't say it for me either," Carrington said, and faced the front.

Renata started them at nine exactly. The kindergarten sang first, twenty of them on the bottom riser in a line that kept bowing forward at both ends until an aide walked down and pushed them back. Their song about rain had words that four of them knew. The rest opened and closed their mouths a beat behind.

Then it continued class by class, and every child said one thing. A first grader had found out that the moon doesn't make any light of its own. The boy after her had found out that his grandfather was born in a country that isn't there anymore, and he said it into the microphone at a volume that made the woman knitting jump up off her seat. A second grader reached the front, opened his mouth, but said nothing. Renata crouched beside him and whispered into his ear, and he said it was something about sharks without sharing the fact, then returned to his spot. His mother whistled and cheered from the audience anyway.

Their chairs touched at the leg. Carrington wore the same perfume she'd worn in the study on Wednesday night, close enough now to taste, and through the whole of the kindergarten's song Lucy wanted to lean four inches sideways and rest her shoulder against Carrington's arm. Nobody in that room would have seen it. She shifted her own knee an inch closer instead and left it there.

Lucy spent the first two classes waiting for Carrington to stand and leave to take a phone call. Before, she had watched Carrington take a call at the kitchen island and be in the car in under four minutes, still holding the fork. This morning, the phone never came out of her coat.

At nine-fifteen, Lucy checked the clock over the door. The second grade still stood on the risers, working through a list of facts about worms. Carrington watched them and hadn't moved since she sat down.

Lucy read the banner all the way across, then again, then backward. The second grade sat down and Renata called the third.

Twenty-two of them climbed the side steps in a line, in uniform, shirts mostly tucked.

"Lucy." Carrington didn't turn her head toward her. "Middle row, third from the left, next to the tall girl with the braids."

"I see," Lucy said.

They worked along the row one at a time, slower than the second grade, because a few of them wanted to add information. A girl had found out that her guinea pig was a boy. Another said hers twice because nobody heard her the first time. A bird had hit the window at her grandmother's house and gotten up again. A boy had found out about the Titanic and had far more to say about it than one line, and Renata let him get to the part with the iceberg before she moved him along.

Grace stood three back in the line, heels together and chin down, then two back, then one. The girl in front of her stepped away, and Grace walked forward and stood on the piece of tape. She'd carried the strip of paper up with her, the one from the tide pools, folded to the size of a stamp and gone furry along the creases. She didn't open it, but she said nothing.

It took about four seconds for everyone to understand that she wasn't going to speak, and then the ambient noise dropped in layers: the parents first, then the teachers along the wall, then the kindergarteners on the floor at the front, who quieted because everyone above them had. The woman with the knitting laid both needles flat in her lap. Renata took half a step toward the risers and stopped.

Lucy's hands lay in her lap, doing nothing at all, and she left them there. Grace stood eleven feet away. Lucy could have carried her out of that room in ten seconds, and she stayed in the chair.

"I counted nineteen anemones," Grace said, finally. "And nineteen was right on Sunday."

She said it flat, in the same monotone voice she'd used at the dinner table for a solid month. Somebody in the back laughed once at the wrong moment and stopped.