“The right thing to do is often not the most prudent thing to do,” Bowen cautioned.
The train was picking up speed now, flying out of the DC corridor and headed toward Columbia, headed toward her past.
“I know.” She met his eyes. “That’s why I asked you along. To get it down for the record. So once I realize how stupid this is—because Senator McDougal does not do stupid things—you can remind me that it was the right thing to do regardless.”
Cleo kept a small apartment on the higher streets of the Upper West Side. When she bought it in law school, the neighborhood had been dicey at best, but over the past decade it had gentrified, and now her little two-bedroom was worth four times what she paid. Maybe five. She knew she was privileged: to have the money to purchase a small apartment in a so-so building in Manhattan at twenty-four. But after her parents died and her grandmother sold her childhood home and the life insurance came in, the money had been split with Georgie, then placed in a trust and released to her upon graduation from Northwestern, where she accepted her diploma with only her sister in the audience.
(Georgie had insisted on flying in, though Cleo also insisted that she needn’t.)
“It’s just a ceremony,” Cleo had said.
“I’m coming,” Georgie had replied.
She had young twins at the time, and had Cleo chosen to confide her terror over being newly pregnant, surely Georgie would have understood. But Cleo didn’t breathe a word about it to her. She already felt out of sorts that Georgie, who had never been particularly reliable, was now steadfastly reliable and showing up to offer her support in lieu of their parents. Looking back on it, Cleo wondered if she might have made different choices with Nobells if she’d had anyone else she trusted or felt that she could rely on. So maybe she should have told Georgie about the pregnancy back then, not when she was eight months along. Maybe depending on one person leads to depending on other people, and then you don’t wind up making self-defeating decisions because you are lonely. Regret.)
Now, in the hallway of her apartment, she reached for the keys in her bag, digging past a half-eaten chocolate bar, a few Veronica Kaye lipsticks, a bunch of pens that worked only on occasion, and dental floss, and remembered how Nobells, a few months into the affair, had been the one to push her toward it—home ownership, that she wouldn’t regret it. He hadn’t been wrong. She didn’t begrudge him that. It gave her roots and made her feel a little more grounded once she moved in with Lucas, whose room she painted a bright royal blue. He was almost two by then, and so she read magazine articles that said it was time for a big-boy bed, and she took him to Pottery Barn Kids and bought him the one that looked like a race car. He couldn’t believe it. That he got to sleep in a race car! And though Cleo so rarely gave herself over to pure joy, she remembered thinking that she’d found it, right there in Pottery Barn Kids, and she had Alexander Nobells to thank for it.
It wasn’t difficult to see why she had been so ingratiated to him. He taught her things, he believed in her, he made her think that she was more special with him than without him. So many years later, Cleo hated this last thing the most: that she could allow a man to convince her that somehow she was more valuable, more coveted, more exceptional because he had chosen her. Also intertwined with this approval was, of course, the fact that he held her future at his firm in his hands. Cleo forgot that a lot of the time when she was with him. She didn’t know how often he forgot it, or if he forgot it at all.
The apartment smelled of lemony 409 cleaning solution, which pleased Cleo. She paid an older woman, Dora, to clean it every Thursday, even when she wasn’t coming into town. But she knew Dora needed the paycheck, and she’d been with her (legally, on the books) since Cleo was in her third year of law school. Back then, Dora had pitched in with an extra set of hands when Lucas was wild or filthy or cranky or hungry—even with the reliable day care, Cleo sometimes felt like she was drowning, and now, when Cleo could repay her, literally and with gratitude, she did. They weren’t friends, rather something akin to friendly business associates, and this level of relationship suited Cleo perfectly.
Cleo hadn’t expected Bowen to accompany her back to her apartment, but he insisted.
“So . . . this is my place,” she said, dropping her keys in a little yellow glass bowl that sat on her foyer console table, just as it had once sat in her childhood home. Her grandmother had given some of her parents’ furnishings to Georgie, who was twenty-seven and in a real home after their accident, and sold most of the rest. But a few trinkets, like vases and their china and picture frames and, of course, most of her mother’s own paintings, she stored away for when Cleo would want them. When her grandmother died, Cleo kept paying for the storage space until she was finally a grown-up of her own. Then, when she put the down payment on this apartment, she paid the storage facility a fee, and they shipped her the boxes via freight.
Cleo glanced at Bowen, a little insecure, a little off her game with him in her space. She didn’t entertain often, well, ever, and she rarely brought men to the apartment. Having him here felt invasive, even though she’d invited him. She hadn’t completely thought it through—that he’d trail her back here, that she’d feel as if she were jumping out of her skin.
“Um, I guess I have a guest room if you’re staying?” she asked, praying quietly that please please please, he wasn’t staying. “It’s my son’s. So the sheets have soccer balls on them.”
“Cleo, I’m not sleeping over.” Bowen laughed easily. “Relax.”
Cleo allowed herself a tiny exhale and padded to the small kitchen, which she’d redone a few years ago. “Good. I just want to be sure that this is professional.” She opened up the fridge, found a Diet Coke, offered him one.
“With due respect, Senator, if I wanted something personal, I’d be back in DC right now. Getting personal.”
Cleo raised her eyebrows. “Your reputation precedes you.”
He bounced his shoulders, put a playful lilt in his voice. “Only good things, I hope . . .”
Cleo held up her free hand, stopping him from taking it any further. He was attractive, yes. More than attractive, fine. But she’d told him on the train why she’d asked him along. She’d explained the mission and the pain behind it, and though Cleo McDougal never really found much use for flirting, she certainly did not find a use for it now. Now was a time to stay focused.
“Please, can we just get through tomorrow and keep this . . .” Cleo drifted off, trying to find the right words. “Can we just . . . I’m a senator. You’re a reporter. That’s it.”
“But I did ask you to drinks last week,” he said, and she glared at him. “Fine,” he continued, “but I’m still not sure I get what we’re doing here. Listen, I do get Me Too. Time’s Up. I support it. I’m here for it. My sisters are constantly texting me articles they want me to cover on the show. Knit me a pink hat, and I’ll wear it and march with you.”
“Knit your own damn hat,” Cleo said. “Also, how on earth would I know how to knit? Do I look like someone who has time to take up knitting?”
“Point taken,” Bowen acknowledged. “But . . . this isn’t just about that. It’s about something else too. And the reporter in me wants to know why.”
Cleo was tired and didn’t want to rehash what she’d shared on the train, which had been about as honest as she could reasonably expect herself to be while also not being completely honest. So she’d told him the stuff about Nobells—about the shame she had repressed over the affair (MaryAnne did get that right) and about the power he held over her when it ended. He had listened as thoughtfully as he’d listen to one of the guests on his show, interrupting only to ask imperative questions, and in this way he reminded her of Matty: a deeper thinker than the surface would suggest. And just as she had reevaluated Matty back in the bar in Seattle, she had found herself reconsidering Bowen as the train whipped through the northeast landscape to New York.
Still, though, now was not the time to consider even a hint
of that attraction. Over the years, Cleo had become an expert in talking herself out of romantic connections—thus, her dating life almost never went past three dinners and/or occasionally fooling around. Romance was messy and unnecessary, and she wasn’t looking for a husband or another child and certainly not gossip headlines, so she compartmentalized romance the way she would, say, buy fresh flowers. They’d be nice to have, but no one ever couldn’t get by without them. She relegated making out with Bowen to buying flowers. That was that.
“Seriously, Cleo, why are you doing this?” Bowen asked again.
She sipped her Diet Coke and thought of all those nights at Pagliacci’s with MaryAnne, draining their cups and going for refills. Bowen wanted to know why, and she wasn’t even sure herself. Why had she done a million things in her life? She just pointed herself north and went, especially after her parents died—following the ambition in her gut. But this time it wasn’t about that. This time it felt like she was running counter to that ambition. This time it felt personal. Why? Because she had caught Jonathan Godwin leaving the HRC dinner with a young replacement for Emily? That was too easy. Maybe it was because once MaryAnne aired the truth, Cleo couldn’t repress her shame any longer. She couldn’t tout herself as a role model for Arianna and her generation while also having wronged Nobells’s wife and having been a pawn in his game. Maybe it was time to address the power imbalance that ran top to bottom through not just the legal profession but educational systems too, and a million other systems beyond that. Or maybe it was simpler than all that: maybe it was just that Gaby, though she would be angry to know Cleo was running this show without her right now, was pushing her to face her regrets in order to launch a presidential bid, and Nobells simply couldn’t be ignored.
She could have chosen about a hundred other regrets from her list, though, and she hadn’t. And she’d come this far—literally about two hundred miles—to do it. But why now? Why this? Cleo wasn’t emotionally intelligent enough to clarify the heart of the why for Bowen. It wasn’t that she didn’t want to; it was that she couldn’t.
She shook her head as he watched her. She wasn’t about to tell him about her list. That was too far, too much, like stripping herself naked in front of him and pointing out all her flaws, asking him to circle them with a Sharpie.
Instead, she said, because this was also true, “Maybe it’s just time.”
She raised her shoulders, then lowered them, and though she understood he wanted more from her, he was also keen enough to accept that, for now, this was the most she had to offer.
Though Cleo expected Bowen to have fancy plans—a nightclub or, at the very least, dinner at the Soho House—he was happy, eager, almost, to stick around the apartment, loitering as if there were nowhere else he’d rather be. He hunched over, peered at pictures that lined her bookshelves—mostly of Lucas over the years, a few of her parents too. Cleo tried to relax and be, well, normal, that he was here, in her space, but she was not so easily adaptable. She found herself skulking into opposite corners and making excuses to straighten up Lucas’s room or refill the bottomless glass of Diet Coke in the kitchen.
She hadn’t heard from Gaby all afternoon, so Cleo assumed that she was knee-deep with Oliver Patel, and though Cleo liked Gaby’s input and feedback on her working weekends, she was relieved to have fallen off her radar. Arianna had uploaded her schedule to her phone, and her staff who worked out of Manhattan had touched base, ready for the few events and the meet and greets that she had with her voters. Cleo didn’t always head to New York City on her working weekends. Sometimes it was Buffalo or Schenectady or Albany or even the North Fork. Her constituents were varied and diverse, and ironically, though Cleo was a loner who despised small talk, she truly loved making the time to meet with them. Part of it was that they had chosen her, which, anyone with any sort of power can tell you, is a little bit intoxicating, but part of it was that they had chosen her to make a difference in their lives. She might be the type of woman who would sabotage her best friend’s hopes for an internship, but she was also the type of woman who could still carry around hope for change. Only Forward! Those two things weren’t incompatible, even if they seemed like they should be.
Cleo’s stomach growled, and she palmed her abdomen with embarrassment when Bowen jolted upright from a photograph he was admiring of her in London with Lucas. He’d heard it from across the living room.
“Sorry,” she said. (Why did she just apologize for being hungry? For her intestines shifting? Like she had any control over that!) “I haven’t eaten anything since DC.”
“I offered you my scone.”
“Ever the gentleman.” Cleo looped her right hand in two circles in front of her like she was a queen taking a bow, then realized she had no idea why she was doing this and stopped.
“Where can we go to get something to eat around here?”
“You don’t have plans tonight?” Cleo asked in a tone that probably betrayed her discomfort.
“Why would I have plans tonight? I came to the city at your request.”
“Right, but, um, I mean, we don’t have to spend twenty-four hours t-together.” Cleo found herself stuttering, and she did not like finding herself stuttering one bit. She also was aware that she would like to shower, that the grit from the train and the taxi and the few blocks they’d walked here when the taxi was at a standstill left her hair matted, her underarms a little damp. It wasn’t that she wanted to look her best for Bowen, but it wasn’t that she didn’t either.
“God, Cleo, relax.” Bowen grinned. “I’m staying at my sister’s tonight. I did make those arrangements.”
“I figured you had a penthouse in Tribeca made of glass.” Her gut rumbled again, and she sat on the couch, as if repositioning herself would quiet her insides.
“Why would I have a penthouse made of glass?”
“Everything about you makes me think that you’d have a penthouse made of glass.” She hunched over an inch, trying to squelch any chance of her intestinal tract shifting. She gestured toward him. “Like, everything about you. Top to bottom.”
“I thought you were smarter than judging a book by its cover,” he said. He picked up the photograph from London, examined it, rested it back down.
“Are you the book or are you the cover?” Cleo said.
Bowen laughed riotously, as if he didn’t give two shits if he were the butt of her joke.
He didn’t, Cleo knew, and she hated that she found this appealing.
THIRTEEN
It was eighty-five degrees the next morning, and Cleo had a fun run in Central Park with her local staff and about five hundred people who each raised money for GreenUpNow!, a nonprofit dedicated to refurbishing downtrodden urban areas in the state that sorely lacked both funding and grass. She shook a lot of hands, took a lot of pictures, and tried not to make too many promises unless she was sure she could follow through. This was one way that Cleo stayed in the good graces of voters—she never lied to them, never told them things they wanted to hear just to gain their votes. Almost inevitably when you glossed over difficult truths, it meant that you got their votes but eventually lost their trust, and that was not a viable long-term plan. It was part of the reason she had initially spurned Senator Jackman’s free housing proposal: she’d told her constituents she wouldn’t give away something for free, even while knowing that many of them didn’t understand that by lifting up some members of their community, they lifted up the community as a whole. But still. She had promised, and she kept her word. Until last week, when she realized that part of her job was convincing her constituents that an unpopular proposal was still the right proposal. That’s why they’d elected her. Not just to be a mirror to their own reflections.
She was enjoying a free Clif bar (breakfast) and an orange at the finish line when two young women approached. She figured that they would press her on her broader GreenUpNow! plans—what could she promise them about a hope for a better tomorrow? She was running through her standard li
nes, but they caught her off guard.
“Hi,” one girl said. Cleo didn’t know if they were even old enough to vote. She thought they looked older than Lucas but maybe not by much. My God, she thought. Is this what Marley Jacobson looks like now? With actual breasts and legs like a gazelle’s and eyes wide enough for Lucas to convince himself that he’s in love? No wonder he was smitten with more than one girl. She had realized, obviously, that her son was smack in the middle of puberty, but seeing young women so close in age to him and seeing them as, well, adults—those were two separate realizations.
“Hi,” the other girl said.
“We’re best friends,” they said together.
“Hi!” Cleo said, pushing her smile as wide as it could go.
“Do you have any advice for us if, like, we want to be successful together, as a team?” the first one said.
“Oh.” Cleo furrowed her brow. “In politics?”
Girl One shook her head, her ponytail swaying behind her. “No.” She looked at the other one. “Well, maybe?”
Her friend said: “We saw your old friend’s article, and, um, we didn’t want to end up like you guys. We’re, like, best friends forever.”
In just a flip of a second, Cleo’s smile fell, and she worried that she might throw up. It had been only a 5k, so she knew it wasn’t from that. The New York air was too humid for May, and her tank top was sticking to her stomach, but it wasn’t that either. She looked from Friend One to Friend Two, their eyes wide, their words said with only openhearted generosity.
“You’re still in high school?” Cleo asked finally. Both girls nodded.
“Sophomores,” they said together. Cleo told herself that Lucas wasn’t even yet a freshman. He couldn’t yet be in this deep with breasts and long legs and beguiling eyes.
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