Page 35 of The Billionaire’s Nanny

Grace ate four strawberries and half a hot dog, then played the bean bag game with Kayla for the rest of the picnic. Carrington stayed by the tables for two hours and talked to three people, without ever sitting down once. Lucy stayed at the other end of the shelter the whole time.

At one o'clock, the two of them carried a cooler each out to the lot, walking on opposite sides of the path, and then Carrington drove one way and Lucy drove the other with Grace in the back saying that Kayla's mom had put root beer in with the water bottles and hadn't told anyone.

It was an ordinary Saturday in a park with two hundred people in it, and Lucy drove home wanting to do it again the next week.

Mira and Anjali were Lucy's two closest friends from college, and she had canceled on both of them twice this month already. Mira had a half day from the courthouse where she worked as a paralegal and picked the restaurant near it. Anjali brought her son, Milo, two and a half and newly in love with the sound a fork made against a table.

"Fourteen days," Mira said, before Lucy had her coat off. "Four texts, and one of them was a thumbs up."

"I've been busy," Lucy said.

"Everyone's busy. I'm busy. I answer," Mira said.

"You answer during depositions," Anjali said. "You need help."

Lucy sat down and put her napkin in her lap and told them about Grace instead. About the fox book and the voice and the twenty-two pages. About the bean bag game with no rules. About Grace, who had not said a word in a classroom for eleven days straight, standing on a piece of tape in front of two hundred people and counting anemones out loud.

Anjali put her hand flat on her chest for that one. Milo dropped the fork.

"Okay," Mira said, and put her glass down. "Now the other thing. You've looked well since the coast. Anjali said it in the car."

"I did say it," Anjali said, going after the fork.

"Are you sleeping with her?" Mira asked.

The fries came. Lucy took one off the top of the pile and ate it and wrapped her hand around the base of her glass. Her mouth had gone dry and the fry did not help.

"It is a job," Lucy said. She heard the tense come out of her mouth and she said it again. "It's a job. It's a good one and that's all it is."

Milo reached over the side of his booster seat for the fork and couldn't get it and hit the tray with his open hand instead, twice, until Anjali gave him a breadstick, and nobody at the table went back to the question.

"Fine," Mira said. "My cousin still flinches when somebody says the name."

"Your cousin lost a bid," Lucy said.

"And eleven pounds," Mira said.

Anjali closed Milo's fist around the breadstick. "I'm glad it's just the job," she said. "The last one nearly finished you."

"It did," Lucy said.

"You were on my couch for a month," Anjali said.

"I know," Lucy said. "It's a good house and a good kid, and I go home at the end of it."

Mira raised her glass an inch off the cloth at that and drank and started in on the deposition she had come to complain about. At ten to two, Anjali stood up with Milo on her hip and said she had to finish a spreadsheet nobody would read. Lucy paid before either of them could reach for it, the way she had at every lunch since February, and neither of them said one word about it.

Grace went to Kayla's straight from school on Monday and was staying until six.

Lucy had set it up the Thursday before. Kayla's mothers had been asking since the assembly, so saying yes to them was easy. The chef went home after lunch on Mondays and the van did not come back. Lucy had worked the whole thing out standing in the kitchen with a dish towel in her hand.

She was at the cottage window at four, and she saw Carrington come around the corner of the house and start down the path.

She had never seen her on the path at all, day or night; Carrington had always waited for Lucy to come up. Now she came down the middle of the gravel in a gray suit with her coat over her arm, in heels, on a wet path, past the hedge and the flower bed and the little buried path lights, at four o'clock in the afternoon, where anybody in the kitchen wing could have looked out and seen her.

Lucy opened the door before she knocked.

"The chef leaves at two," Carrington said. "Nadia's at the office until six, and the gardeners aren't due until Wednesday. I have until quarter to six."