assessment, but then again, MaryAnne had thrown these punches first. Cleo set down his phone and headed to her office to grab her own. There would be texts; there would be emails. Gaby would already be working with her team on crafting a media response. “Don’t worry about this, bud. It’s nothing.”
“That’s what people say when they’ve done something that they shouldn’t have,” he called after her.
“Have you brushed your teeth?” she called back. “We’re leaving in ten.”
“Yes,” he said. “Stop asking me that. I’m not eight.”
Cleo suspected he was lying about his teeth, but he was right: he wasn’t eight anymore; he had to learn about consequences. This was part of her parenting strategy: consequences. Unprotected sex led to unplanned pregnancies; abandoned best friends led to op-eds twenty years later. Choices are made, regrets are managed, consequences arise.
She’d learned all about them too.
TWO
Gaby was as mad as Cleo expected. Maybe mad wasn’t the correct description. Gabrielle, like Cleo, practically levitated when faced with an obstacle, particularly one that made her, well, furious, so this was Gaby at her utmost. By the time Cleo got to her office—after an emergency speakerphone call while dropping Lucas at school (he wore noise-canceling headphones because that’s just what he did in the car anyway)—Gaby, in heels that would cramp Cleo’s arches in a second flat, and in a slim navy blazer and even slimmer navy pants, had already written a response to be released to reporters, booked Cleo on CNN, and lined up a nine thirty a.m. conference call with lucrative campaign donors. Her staff of thirty-five was buzzing about like a well-oiled machine, even when faced with calamity, and Gaby barked orders, each staffer scurrying to nail down her own task. (Of her DC staff, only four were men. Cleo’s choice.) This efficiency, this competence, was why Cleo had hired Gabrielle for her very first run for office, when she was only a recent law school graduate and the mother of a toddler and brazen in the way that you have to be at twenty-four (elected at twenty-five to meet the constitutional minimum) to presume that you could beat a seven-time incumbent who had previously sleepwalked into reelection. (Incidentally, Martin Bridgewater was indicted on charges of insider trading the next year, so Cleo felt that she had done him a favor beating him so he didn’t have to step down to public scorn and scrutiny.)
“This will just be a blip,” Gaby said, staring at her phone, reading and talking and strategizing all at once. She looked up, locked eyes with Cleo, who was settling in behind her highly organized, extremely neat desk, unwinding her scarf that warded off the late-spring chill, sinking into her chair that needed some WD-40 again to stop the squeaking. “I’ll squelch this like . . .” She snapped her fingers. “Like that.”
“I know,” Cleo said. “This doesn’t worry me.” A beat. “All that much.”
She reached over and straightened a pile of color-coded folders, then brushed some dust off the silver-plated picture frame with a shot of Lucas when he was a toddler and dressed as a chocolate-chip cookie for Halloween.
“We can have the bitch killed,” Gaby said, laughing just a little. She knew, as a black woman, that she had to manage her anger, at least outwardly, though not so much in front of Cleo, who had known her since their second year at Columbia Law. If she said this aloud outside the office, the headlines would go on for days, likely ruining her career and possibly ruining any hope of Cleo’s run for president.
“That might be extreme: death,” Cleo replied. “She’s just nursing a grudge from high school, though the paternity stuff is wildly out-of-bounds. Obviously.” She tapped her mouse, zapping the screen saver of the suffragettes and waking her computer. “Still, I suppose I could have been kinder back then.”
“We all could have been kinder in high school.”
“Weren’t you elected, like, homecoming queen?”
“Well, sure.” Gaby reached for a protein bar from her bag. She was training for a marathon and had to eat every two hours. “But I didn’t get there by being nice. Homecoming queens are elected by playing dirty.”
“I wouldn’t know. I was not homecoming queen.”
“I don’t list it on my résumé,” Gaby said. “Though it was pretty great training for now. Is Lucas OK?”
“Fine, actually. He knows it isn’t true.” Cleo sighed. She had real work to do and just wanted this to evaporate. “I can reach out to MaryAnne. I think