going to go on a ‘no regrets regrets’ tour and show everyone how likable, how relatable you are, even when you’ve made mistakes, stepped in the figurative shit.”
Cleo probably looked unconvinced. Because she was.
Gaby softened. “Cleo, the easiest, cheapest shot is for them to paint you as unlikable. If you were the majority leader, who cares; no one would give a shit. That’s the luxury of having a dick.”
Cleo groaned.
“This will make people fall in love with you. It will be your armor against the inevitable other stuff—the less-than-kind stuff—that will come your way. It’s already starting with MaryAnne’s op-ed.”
Cleo started to protest but then stopped because what Gaby said was the truth.
“We’re going to make them love you,” Gaby said. “Then we’re going to round them up to vote for you.”
Cleo audibly sighed, which Gaby correctly took as a concession.
“Narrow it down to ten,” Gaby said as her phone blew up again. “I want a list of ten regrets—juicy enough to be appealing but not so juicy that charges will be filed. And then I’ll pick five. Maybe more. We’ll see how it goes.”
“First of all, no charges can be filed! I’m not a criminal! I’m a senator.”
Gaby laughed. “You know those aren’t necessarily mutually exclusive.”
“Fine,” Cleo huffed. “I’ll narrow it down to ten. But we get to agree on the five. Because this is my life out there, not yours.”
She squeezed her eyes closed. There was no point in arguing this further. Cleo had been brilliant at law school—she’d graduated number two. But Gaby was number one.
Gaby’s phone was on fire now, and she was on her feet, pointed toward the door. “Shit, I need to take this. MaryAnne Newman has officially become a pain in my ass.”
She headed toward the door just as Arianna in her blinding sweater rushed in, still pale, still nervous, with the WD-40.
“I’m sorry,” Arianna said to no one, to all of them.
Cleo did not correct her.
THREE
The condo was dark by the time Cleo got home. She’d made the decision when Lucas was starting kindergarten to move to DC full-time and commute back to New York, her representative state, on the weekends. With no coparent and no grandparents, there was simply no other way to do it and still provide him stability and also be a (relatively) present mother.
The day the movers came, though, she did jot the move down on her list of regrets. She thought she was doing the right thing—adding her voice to the political landscape—but she was twenty-eight and a single mom and, honestly, though she trusted her decision-making, she didn’t totally trust all her decision-making.
Thus, she supposed, the list. A way to track her decisions when they went awry.
That’s all her dad was trying to say from it, she was sure. She couldn’t ask him now. He had a brother who lived in . . . she wasn’t quite certain . . . she thought maybe Bozeman, and maybe she could have reached out over the years and asked if he kept a list too and why it started and if it gave him peace of mind, but her father and her uncle hadn’t been close, and she hadn’t heard from him since just around the funeral. Cleo wasn’t the type to chase down estranged relatives in Montana if they didn’t want to be involved in the first place.
She flipped on the lights in her kitchen. There was an abandoned half-empty pizza box on the counter, which meant Lucas was home from soccer practice and, she hoped, doing his homework, not rewatching Stranger Things, which he had now binged three times this spring and was actually beginning to concern her. She grabbed a slice, shoved the box in the fridge, and tiptoed to his room, devouring half the piece before she even reached his door. (The vanilla macadamia muffin had not been sustaining.) She didn’t want to eavesdrop, but she didn’t want to burst in there without knowing what she was getting herself into. Teenagers harbored all sorts of secrets.
His room was silent but the light was on, so she knocked, and he grunted, so she entered.
He was sprawled on his bed with his laptop open and his palm curled around his phone, which he immediately shoved under the covers. Cleo hoped he wasn’t looking at porn.
“Hey, how was your day? Soccer go OK?”
“Yep.”
“Your coach being nicer?”
While Lucas shared relatively little with Cleo (very, very, very little, in fact, but who knew what was normal, since he was