When we last saw Nanny, she was screaming into a spy camera hidden in a teddy bear.

The put-upon heroine of 2002's "The Nanny Diaries" had unleashed a stern rebuke to her pampered and clueless employers before marching out of their lives and restarting her own.

It was a cathartic end to a novel that would go on to sell more than 2 million copies, inspire a movie and launch the careers of its young co-authors, Emma McLaughlin and Nicola Kraus.

What happened to Nanny was a question that has gone unanswered for seven years. The writing duo penned three more books before deciding to finally revisit their best-loved heroine. It wasn't something they did lightly.

"We were terrified," says McLaughlin. "We've all loved books and then read a sequel to something that we loved and just wished the story had been left off where it had been. As consumers, as readers, we know what that is and I didn't want to do that to someone else."

The result is "Nanny Returns," which picks up 12 years after the teddy bear incident. After years abroad, Nan is 33, back in Manhattan and married to Ryan (aka Harvard Hotie) when she gets a drunken, late-night visit from 16-year-old Grayer, her former charge.

"It was emotional _ very emotional _ to go back to them," says McLaughlin, who says she cried when she co-wrote the opening passages. "We knew them."

During a recent interview at a Midtown cafe, the authors, including a very pregnant Kraus, scarf down salads as they detail their sudden rise, how they write and why it took so long to find out what happened to Nanny.

The duo, who met at New York University and had worked as nannies for more than 30 New York City families, spent two years writing "The Nanny Diaries" and had few expectations when it came out.

"We thought our parents would buy it and we would go on to our lives," McLaughlin says. "We were humbly blessed to catch the zeitgeist and step into a media cycle."

Somewhat lost in the hubbub _ including endless attempts to unmask the villain of the book, known only as Mrs. X, who was based on a composite _ was what the authors were trying to do: expose a social system that outsources parenting to an ever-changing phalanx of caregivers, producing unhappy children.

"When we wrote 'Nanny Diaries,' there were many things that we considered red flags waving. That didn't get through the hullabaloo about 'Nanny.' So we were like, 'We need to go back and underscore that if you let these kids grow up like this, they will someday be in charge of your health care,'" McLaughlin says.

"And they won't care," adds Kraus.