Page 39 of The Billionaire’s Nanny

"I'll move the Thursday meeting to nine in the morning," she said. "If that's easier."

"Nine is fine."

Devika picked up the stack and held the door. "I'll tell her Wednesday,” she said. "That gives me a day to brief Agatha."

Carrington walked down the hall to her office and lifted her coat off the back of the chair. Then she took her car keys out of the drawer instead of calling down for the car, and she did not tell Nadia where she was going.

The ridge road followed the coast a mile inland, and she was on it before the light began to fade, driving with the radio off and both hands on the wheel. Past the water tower, the cemetery road came up on the right. Clara had hated that cemetery. She had said so at their mother's funeral, standing in the wind on a hill with no trees or shade on it. And Carrington had buried Clara up there anyway. She did not slow down. The turn was on the left, between two mailboxes on the same post, and she took it and drove down the gravel to Clara’s house.

Roses had grown and wrapped all over the trellis at the end of the porch and gone leggy without anybody to cut them back. The herbs along the path had bolted, and they stood dry and waist-high in their beds. The bird feeder hung on its hook at the corner of the porch, empty, the same as it had been on the day of Clara's funeral.

Carrington let herself in with a key from her keyring. She had told the maintenance service to keep the house at fifty-five degrees so nothing froze, and they had kept it consistent since January. She stood in the hall, wearing a thin suit, and within a minute, her feet were cold through the soles of her shoes. Circulars sat on the hall table where the cleaner left whatever came. Clara's coats were still on the hooks, three of them, and a scarf over the top of the newel post.

The stairs at the end of the hall climbed into the dark. The room that had been Grace's was the first door at the top, and Clara's was the one after it. Carrington had been up there once, in January, filling two suitcases and a laundry basket with her niece's clothes while Nadia held the bags open for her. She hadn’t been up since. She stayed on the ground floor.

She turned into the kitchen first and stopped at the sink. The window over it looked straight down the length of the porch rail at the feeder. Clara had stood here with her hands in the water looking at that feeder every day she had lived in this house. A chair had been pulled out from the table and never pushed back in.

The study was the second door on the left.

Books stood two deep on every shelf, with two more stacks on the floor beside the desk, spines out, no order to any of it. A field guide to shorebirds lay across the top of one stack with a bus ticket in it for a bookmark. A mug sat on the corner of the desk mat with a dark ring dried into the bottom. Grace's school photograph from the year before leaned against the foot of the lamp, the one with the blue background and the crooked collar.

On the wall by the window, a paper calendar hung open, still showing January. Somebody had written a dentist's appointment in the box of the fourteenth, in handwriting Carrington would have recognized anywhere.

The cleaner came every two weeks and did only the counters and the floors, leaving everything else alone. Carrington had told her not to move anything. Dust had settled over the top of the desk in a soft, even layer.

Over the back of the desk chair was a green cardigan with the elbows gone thin. It had been there since January, too, and nobody had moved it since.

Carrington pulled the chair out and sat down in it.

It was set low; Clara was three inches shorter than her. Her knees came up higher than they should have, and the desk was too high in front of her. She had to reach for the edge of it.

Carrington leaned forward with her elbows on her knees. Then she sat back into it, and the cardigan bunched up between her shoulder blades, thick and lumpy, and it did not press flat the way a cushion would.

She wanted to put on the cardigan, to slip her arms in the same Clara would have. She kept both hands flat on her knees until the urge passed.

She had been in this room four times in her life. Twice for a Christmas, once for a weekend she had cut short, and once on the day of the funeral, standing just inside the door with a glass in her hand and her coat still on, for eleven minutes.

Her phone rang in her coat pocket at ten past seven.

"Ms. Cole, it's Madeline Ives," the agent said. "You said tonight."

"Go on."

"Two showings since March. Neither came back. Both of them told me the same thing out in the driveway before they got in the car. It's somebody's house." Madeline stopped there for a second. "It's the best-built house on that road, and it still looks like somebody lives there."

"What are you asking me for?"

"A decision. Let me bring in a company to empty it and furnish it properly, and I'll have an offer on it in six weeks. Or take it off the market and try again in the fall, when I'll be telling you the same thing I'm telling you now."

Carrington looked at the mug on the desk mat.

"Take it off the market," she said.

Madeline didn't answer for a second. "All right. Can I ask what changed?"

"Nothing changed."

"Then I'll say the rest of it anyway, because that's what you pay me for. You're paying the taxes and the insurance and a cleaner every two weeks on a house nobody even lives in. Another year of that is real money out of the trust, and the trust belongs to that little girl."