20. Lucy
LUCY
"Does Ms. Harper eat down there now or up here?"
Lucy had her hands in the sink. She started to turn around.
"Down there," Carrington said.
"Right." The chef marked it off on her list and went into the pantry for the flour.
The water was hot enough that Lucy had stopped feeling it. She shut it off and stood there with her hands dripping into the basin. She lifted the pan out and stood it on the rack.
"Ms. Harper."
Lucy looked over her shoulder. The pantry door was open and the chef was at the back of it, moving cans. Nobody else was in the kitchen.
"Ms. Cole," she said.
"There's a form on the hall table about the aquarium trip in June. Fill it in and leave it out for me to sign."
"All right."
She shook the water off her hands and dried them down the front of her jeans, then turned around.
Carrington was standing across the island from her in the gray suit, a book open in front of her and her mug of coffee at her elbow.
She had been down here in the kitchen for about ten minutes and had not touched either one.
"In front of Grace, I'd like you to still call me Lucy," she said.
Carrington looked up at her. "That isn't what we agreed to."
"I know. I'm asking you to change one thing in it."
"She's seven. She repeats everything she hears and not always to me."
"Not this."
"Especially this." Carrington picked the coffee mug up at last, swirled it, and set it down again. "If she hears it one way in here and another way at school, she'll ask which one is right. And she'll ask somebody. I don't get to pick who."
Lucy pushed the pan an inch along the rack and lined it up with the edge and took her time about it. It was the same case Carrington had made upstairs on Saturday night, and Lucy had agreed with it then too.
"Fine," she said.
"Thank you," Carrington said.
The chef came out of the pantry with the flour bin against her hip and put it down on the marble. Lucy set the milk on the stove to warm and got the cinnamon down off the shelf. Behind her, Carrington and the chef planned out the week together.
Grace came downstairs at ten past seven with her shoes already on and her hair loose around her shoulders.
"Sit up here," Lucy said.
Grace climbed onto the stool and planted both elbows on the marble. She looked into the bowl before she started on it. Carrington came back through with her bag on her shoulder and her coat over one arm. She stopped by the stool and put her hand on the back of the chair, not touching Grace.
"I'll be home before dinner," she said.
"Okay,” Grace replied.
"Ms. Harper." Carrington nodded once at her.
Then she let herself out into the courtyard and pulled the door shut. Grace looked up from the bowl at the sound of it, checked Lucy's face, and put another spoonful in her mouth.
Lucy had agreed to this. Nobody had made her. She took the brush off the shelf and ran it through Grace's hair softly.
It was the job she had been hired to do, and none of it had changed. She woke in the cottage instead of in Carrington's bed. She came up the path at six with the light already on the hedge, let herself in at the courtyard door, and nobody who saw her would have thought a thing about it.
That was the part she had not counted on. There was nothing to hide anymore, because there was nothing happening. She had spent April going back down that path at ten to five carrying her shoes, with her pulse in her ears, and this week was easier than any of it, yet she hated every hour.
She called Carrington Ms. Cole in the house, and once in the car by herself, to hear whether it was coming out sounding naturally yet. It was.
At breakfast, she stayed on her feet by the sink while Carrington ate sitting on the stool.
Normally, she sat opposite from Carrington every morning and even though nobody had asked her to eat standing up, on Tuesday, she did.
By the end of the week, sitting down to eat would have been the strange thing to do.
On Thursday, the chef asked whether Ms. Cole would be in for dinner.
Lucy said she would have to check with Nadia.
Lucy would have known in April; that was what had hurt.
She had known Carrington's whole week then, the dinners and the travel and which nights ran late, and now she found it out the same way the chef did.
At nine every night, she opened the logbook on the table in the cottage and wrote four or five lines about Grace’s day, for a stranger to read on the twentieth.
Slept through. Ate. School fine. Every word of it was true, and not one word of it was worth reading.
It took eleven minutes. Then she shut the book and left it out on the counter.
Grace did not stop talking throughout the week.
She talked in the car, and she came looking for Lucy in the kitchen at half past three with her shoes still on.
But she stopped reading the whale book out loud to herself after dinner.
Lucy thought nothing much of it. Then on Thursday afternoon, Lucy went up to put a stack of Grace's shirts away, and the end of the windowsill was bare.
Lucy got down on one knee and looked under the bed. The book was back in the cardboard box, laid flat on top of the shoebox with the two rubber bands around it, where Deborah had told her she could leave it for years if that was what she wanted.
Lucy put the shirts in the drawer and pushed it shut with her hip.
She left her palm flat on the front of it.
Downstairs, she started the potatoes. At dinner she asked Grace about the cartwheel girl and about the aquarium trip in June, and Grace answered both.
Lucy purposefully didn’t ask her about the book that was now tucked away in the dark.
On Sunday night, she got Grace into bed at half past eight, read two pages aloud to her, latched the closet door, and was down at the cottage by a quarter to nine.
She wrote the log at the table. Slept through Saturday. Ate a whole plate of the fish. Asked twice about the gate code and I told her twice.
Nobody had asked her to do anything else that day.
She lay on the gray sectional with a paperback, reading the same page four times because her mind kept wandering.
No radiator ticking, no television through a wall, nothing in the cottage but the refrigerator coming on and going off again.
At ten past ten, she got up and put on her shoes again.
The low lights were on down the border of the path, sunk in at ankle height, and the grass between them and the gravel was already wet. Lucy walked up on the grass. The kitchen was dark except for the little bulb over the range. She went through the courtyard door and up the stairs.
Grace's door was shut with the nightlight glowing underneath the crack.
Lucy stopped there and counted for three breaths, then she carried on down the landing.
Her hands were unsteady. She wanted Carrington so much that she made herself go slowly, and she held the handle down while she pushed and let it up again on the other side.
Lucy walked in and saw Carrington sitting on the side of the bed with her hair down and a book lying on her knee. She looked up. Neither of them said anything, and then Carrington put the book on the nightstand and stood.
"I was going to come down," Carrington said.
"But you never come down."
"No."
Lucy pulled her sweater and shirt over her head and folded them neatly.
She placed them on the chair before slipping out of her jeans.
Sweater at the bottom of the pile, shirt on top of it, jeans across the seat with the belt still through the loops, so she would not have to hunt for a belt in the dark at five in the morning.
She had learned that in April, on a morning when her shirt ended up on the floor by the door and cost her two minutes.
Two minutes had not mattered then. She had been laughing about it on the path.
But now, an extra two minutes could mean getting caught.
When Lucy looked up, Carrington was watching her. "Lucy."
"I know."
Lucy pressed the door until she felt it latch properly, then she got into the bed.
The sheets were cooler than she expected.
The lamp on the far bedside table threw a low amber arc across the pillow, just enough to see by.
Carrington was propped on one elbow, still wearing all her clothes. She had only taken off her shoes.
Her hair was still up, the knot at the back of her neck with three pins holding it, maybe four. The gold earrings were gone, and on the bedside table behind her, lined up in a neat row on the oak surface, were her rings.
Carrington reached for her, and her hand found the side of Lucy's face. She traced the line of Lucy's jaw with her thumb, and Lucy felt the whole week collapse into that single point of contact.
"Lucy."
There it was again, low and unhurried. Lucy turned her face into Carrington's palm and pressed there.
She felt Carrington's breath catch, a small, controlled hitch, like a sentence interrupted mid-word.
Her fingers were cool and very still against Lucy's cheek, and Lucy kissed the base of her thumb.
"Come here," Carrington said, and Lucy was already moving.
She fitted herself against Carrington's body, face to face on the wide bed. She tilted her chin up and Carrington angled down to kiss. Lucy opened her mouth against Carrington's and felt Carrington's hand slide from her jaw into her hair.
Carrington's fingers spread against her scalp and pulled, and Lucy's hips jerked forward into the contact of Carrington's thigh between hers.
She was already wet, had been wet since she turned the corner of the landing and saw the line of light under the door.
She ground against the fabric of Carrington's pants and didn't pretend she wasn't doing it.
Lucy pulled back enough to look at her. Her mouth was swollen from kissing, and her eyes were dark and focused on Lucy with an intensity that made Lucy want to take her apart slowly.