Cleo didn’t know whom, but she was glad that he appeared to have more friends than his morose demeanor would indicate. His leg bounced as their town car cruised down I-5 toward their hotel, his neck swiveling every which way as he took in the landscape, each turn of the freeway a new memory for Cleo and a new sight for Lucas. The Space Needle, where they’d held their spring dance. The expanse of Lake Washington where she spent summers, before she became so laser focused on moving up, up, up, jumping off the docks of more affluent friends who lived on the water. The looming mountains, where her dad had taken her to learn how to ski.
Gaby had booked them at a downtown Sheraton, and their rooms were not ready upon their late-afternoon arrival.
“I have to share with you?” Lucas whined.
“I won’t peek at anything,” Cleo said. She made a cross-her-heart sign across her chest and immediately regretted it. Lucas thought emojis were lame; this was not going to endear her to him either. “No, really, Luke, I’ll give you as much privacy as you need.”
He sighed as Gaby pecked at her phone and said: “Uber’s on the way. Lucas, you’ll film it from your phone—you probably know your way around the tech better than I do.” Lucas shrugged, as if this were totally normal, and Gaby took it as a yes. Then she looked toward Cleo, as if she did not need to be in the know until now. (Cleo always needed to be in the know.) “If you want, because I sprang this on you, we can count this as one of your five.”
“My five?”
“Five regrets. After this, we can be down to four. Though, to be honest, I expected to have the ten to choose from by now.”
“It’s been twelve hours!” Cleo snapped.
Gaby didn’t give her the dignity of a reply because they both knew that Cleo could damn well get anything accomplished in twelve hours if she really wanted to.
“Let’s go clean up so you’re camera-ready,” Gaby said instead.
“Wait . . . now? We’re doing this now?” Cleo clutched the handle of her roller bag, like this could anchor her to the floor of the lobby of the Sheraton. She wasn’t mentally prepared to show up at MaryAnne Newman’s doorstep while still reeking of stale plane air and with a stomach filled with only half a turkey wrap that cost eleven dollars on board. “I need . . . I need to shower! I need to think about what I want to say. I need . . .” She caught a glance of her reflection in the front windows of the hotel. Maybe it was the prospect of facing her old ghosts, but honestly, she looked like a ghoul.
Gaby waved her hand. “I want this truthful, and I want it as close to raw as it can get. This is what we need to tap into.” She jabbed Cleo in the chest, right where her heart was beating too loudly. “This—heart. We’ll get there right as the sun is setting, and it will be picturesque and cinematic and cathartic, and then everyone is going to love you. But yes, let’s go swipe some lipstick on.”
Cleo exhaled loudly, enough to let Gaby know that none of this pleased her.
“You don’t know MaryAnne. It is not going to be that easy.”
“How can you be sure?”
“Because if she showed up and did the same to me, I’d never let her off the hook.”
MaryAnne Newman lived in the ritzy part of Seattle. Of course. Growing up, Cleo hadn’t been lacking, but she wasn’t part of the upper echelons of Seattle society. The kids who lived in Broadmoor or Windermere or just off the golf course of the country club were always kind enough—Cleo didn’t want to pin her ambition to class differences or bank accounts or that she drove a beat-up Jetta while they got new BMWs and Jeeps. Seattle was a town where, theoretically, everyone was welcome and embraced and peace, love, and understanding were taught and imparted and mostly put into practice too. Cleo never went without—her parents did perfectly well. But as the Uber wound through the wide, manicured streets, punctuated with high hedges and bursting rosebushes and blooming rhododendrons, Cleo so easily reacquainted herself with that steady bleat of “less than,” just like she had those first few times her mother dropped her at MaryAnne’s in elementary school. It was subtle, niggling—nothing that beat you