Page 38 of The Billionaire’s Nanny

At twenty past five, Carrington climbed out of the gap and found one shoe and put her shirt back on standing at the window with her back to the room, doing the buttons from the bottom in the light. Lucy stayed on the floor with the cushion under her head and watched her do it and did not offer to help with any of it.

"I have to be seen at half past," Carrington said.

"Nobody's stopping you," Lucy said.

Carrington pinned her hair back up with three pins out of her jacket pocket and did it without a mirror in about fifteen seconds. It was not as neat as usual, but it stayed up. She picked her coat up off the arm of the section that hadn't split. At the door, she stopped with her hand on the lock and turned around. She looked at the two halves of the sectional and the cushion on the floor and Lucy lying between them.

"I'll have somebody come out and look at that," Carrington said.

"Don't you dare," Lucy said.

Carrington went up the path with her coat over her arm, and Lucy watched her from the window until she went around the corner of the house.

Grace came home at six with a root beer she had been given permission to have and a long story about a hamster. At dinner, she ate everything on her plate. And after, she read four pages of the fox book and tried the fox voice twice. It was bad both times, but Lucy still smiled. Grace was fast asleep before Lucy reached the door.

Lucy walked down the path at a quarter to nine. Then she got down on the floor and fixed the couch herself. The two halves hooked together underneath with four metal clips, and she lined them up and worked them shut one at a time with the handle of a butter knife, holding a flashlight in her teeth. Three of them stayed shut, but the fourth wouldn’t hook, no matter what she did. Eventually, she stopped fighting it and shoved the whole thing back against the wall with her shoulder and left it. It would hold, as long as nobody sat on the left end.

At nine, she sat down at the table with her hands flat on it and said the thing she whispered aloud every night since the week she moved in.

“This is a job. She is not your child.” She stopped and didn’t say the third line.

Lucy turned off the light over the stove and stayed standing at the counter in the dark. She had spent four years in a house with four bedrooms and a garden and everything paid for, and nobody in it had ever asked her to stay. She had never once been as happy there as she had been in the last ten days, in a cottage that belonged to somebody else, keeping a secret that could end tomorrow.

15

CARRINGTON

Carrington closed the folder at six o'clock while her acquisitions counsel was still talking.

The maps were laid out down the middle of the table, four lots on Fenwick Street with three of them shaded and the fourth left white. The white one was a print shop on the corner that had not printed anything since 2009. Its owner was eighty-one. She had turned down four offers, the last one absurd, and she had done it every time in a letter written out by hand.

Devika was going through the numbers. Three of the lots at the price they had already agreed on. The fourth at whatever the fourth required, and if the woman would not sell at all, then renting the corner from her instead and building around it. Eighteen months of paying for the block before anybody could put a shovel in the ground. It was a good plan. Carrington could have finished it for her by the second sentence.

The lamp over the table cast a hard line of light across the maps. In January, she would have driven down there the same afternoon, sat with an eighty-one-year-old woman for an hour with no lawyer and no paperwork, come out having bought the place, and been pleased with herself the whole way back.

"Ms. Cole," Devika said. "Do you want the last part again?"

"Yes."

Devika repeated it with no impatience in her voice. "She agreed to meet. Tuesday or Wednesday, at the shop, forty minutes. But she won't sit down with counsel. She wants whoever will sign for it."

"Send Agatha," Carrington said.

"For the meeting?" Devika said.

"For all of it."

Devika waited two seconds. "Agatha Whitlock is a lawyer."

"She's a very good one."

"The owner asked for you," Devika said. "I spent two days getting her to agree to sit down at all."

"She can take the meeting or leave it."

"All right," Devika said.

Devika wrote it down. She straightened the maps and put the elastic around them.