Page 87 of The Billionaire’s Nanny

"Seven in the morning," she said, and then, "Somebody should go up and put Grace to sleep."

Grace had the folder open on the rug and hadn't done a line of it. She had the pad next to her knee with the pen clipped on.

Carrington started to sit down on the bed and stopped. It put her head and shoulders above Grace. She got onto the rug instead and leaned against the frame. The floor was harder than she had expected and she wasn't going to complain about it.

"The lady with the bag asked us something," she said. "Lucy wouldn't tell you what it was. She said it was mine to tell you."

Grace put the pen down. Carrington hadn't worked out how to say it, and she said it badly.

"She asked whether Lucy was more to me than somebody who works here. I said no. That wasn't true and I knew it wasn't when I said it. Then she asked Lucy the same thing. Lucy said yes, and I sent her away for it that same day."

Grace pulled the pad onto her knees and wrote and turned it around.

Because she said yes?

Carrington nodded. “Yes.”

Grace took it back. She wrote underneath, low on the page, pressing hard enough that Carrington heard the pen going on the pad.

That's not fair.

"No, it isn’t fair to punish someone for telling the truth."

Grace looked at her for a while. Then she wrote again.

Is she downstairs now?

"She's in the study."

She turned it around once more without lifting her hand off it.

Will she be here in the morning too?

"I don't know yet," Carrington said. "I'll tell you in the morning. Even if it's the bad one."

Grace tore the page off along the top and held it out. Carrington folded it once and put it in her pocket. Then she shut the closet door hard and turned the handle to check it, the same as every night. She didn't reach for the fox book. She turned the lamp off, left an inch of the door standing open, and went down.

Lucy was sitting down. She had taken the chair on the near side of the desk. Her coat was folded on the arm of it with the rabbit's ears sticking out of the pocket. She had refused to sit in this room the last time she stood in it.

"You said something to me in the kitchen," Lucy said. "About the check and the number on it."

"I shouldn't have."

"You were half right and you don't know which half." Lucy turned her hands over on her knees. "Her name was Elena Marchetti."

Carrington stopped short of the desk.

"Four years. Her house, her kid, her bed, and not one person in that town ever found out what I was to her." Lucy said it flatly without emotion. "Then her wife came back. Two weeks after that, Elena sat me down and was gentle with me for about an hour, and then she put a check under the fruit bowl on the counter."

"Lucy."

"I took it."

"You took it?"

"I cashed it that Friday and moved four years of accumulated life into six boxes." Her hands went flat on her thighs and stopped doing anything at all. "So a bigger number wouldn't have got me. Somebody got me once for a perfectly ordinary one. That's the half you had wrong."

Carrington put her hands on the desk. "I sent you back down that path to live like staff," she said, "and you said yes to it in under a minute."