script, she had followed this with some line like He’s your son or He’s our son, but she knew that she didn’t need to. Doug’s stunned silence conveyed everything she needed to know.
“I left Northwestern and didn’t tell you,” Cleo said. “Obviously. And you can hate me, and you may, and I can live with that. But please, I hope you won’t hate him. And I composed a whole script to justify what I did, but there really isn’t any excuse.”
Lucas glanced toward his mom then, their hands intertwined and his eyes wet, and she said, “How you could ever think you were a regret—” Her nose stung, and her chin quivered again. “You’re the best accomplishment of my life. And I’m sorry that I have made a mess of this for you.” She looked at Doug now. “For both of you. I’m sorry.”
Doug really didn’t know how to react, which was both reasonable and justified. But he asked Cleo to give him some time alone with Lucas so they could talk, and though her instinct was to stay and protect her son, she realized that maybe her instinct was to stay to protect herself. Lucas was now the age where he could see how deeply flawed she was, and she couldn’t shield either of them from the mistakes she made and the ripple effects that she passed on.
“I’ll text you when we’re done,” Lucas said, and Doug looked at him, bewildered, as if he couldn’t believe he had a teen who could text his mother and also had the fortitude to sit in a café and drink a cashew latte with the man he just learned was his father. Doug probably couldn’t believe it, actually. If he had, Cleo might have been more alarmed.
She tried to calm herself by walking around her old neighborhood, where she and MaryAnne used to roam after school. She peered into shop windows and occasionally wandered in. She turned a corner and found a store devoted exclusively to mirrors, which she thought was a little niche, but she was no longer this area’s target market, so what did she know?
She stepped inside and squinted: the light from the sun outside was bouncing off the dozens and dozens of mirrors—the brass-framed ones, the antique warped ones, the bold floor-to-ceiling ones. She was inclined to slip on her sunglasses but reconsidered; she thought she’d be missing the point.
“Let me know if you want something,” a disinterested twentysomething with dyed black hair and too much eyeliner said without looking up from her phone.
Cleo peered closer at herself in a giant mirror in the shape of a star. She had lines around her eyes now, and she was going to have to do something about the stray gray hair or two before they launched the campaign. Women couldn’t be perceived as old, she knew. Through the mirror in front of her, she saw her reflection all around the store, from every unflattering angle, and from the well-lit good-looking ones too.
She straightened up and checked her phone for a text from Lucas. There wasn’t one.
She thanked the cashier and tugged the door open and stepped back onto the sidewalk into the Seattle sun. She resolved right then, in her hometown, on her old stomping grounds, that she wasn’t going to dye those gray hairs after all. Through everything, her parents, her pregnancy, Alexander Nobells, Congress, all of it, she’d earned them.
Fuck that, she thought without any sense of apology, without any hint of regret at all. I’m going to show up just as I am.
TWENTY-NINE
Doug, though extremely upset with Cleo, took none of this out on Lucas. So Cleo was correct in remembering that he was a nice guy. And in fact, he had a story of his own. After moving to Seattle postcollege for the tech scene, he also discovered the thriving gay scene and further discovered that there was a reason he had to be eight beers in to sleep with Cleo and anyone else of the female persuasion. And thus was now happily married to a man named Bradley, who was a private chef. They had two beagles but no children, though they were considering it. They played for an amateur soccer team on Saturdays, which explained a lot about Lucas’s golden foot.
Lucas told Cleo all this once he finally texted her about an hour and a half later.
Doug invited Lucas to dinner that night but did not extend the same invitation to Cleo, and she