at the office while the heroic Emily Godwin dropped Lucas off at home, and solve for whatever question mark had been presented. Until no question mark remained. She might have been a bitch, but she was a bitch who did her homework.
Finally Matty said, “I mean, look. I’m just a white dude who lives in a loft with his Microsoft money, so correct me if I’m wrong. And I don’t want to speak out of turn. But it seems to me that when women talk about supporting women, neither of you put your best foot forward back then.” He hesitated, staring at the grains of wood on the bar, seemingly uneager to meet her eyes. “And now? I’d think that you’d each know better.”
Cleo sighed, then rested her head on his shoulder, surprising herself. She had never thought of him as particularly smart, but it turned out that he was actually quite wise. Regrets, she thought, maybe I have one more.
Lucas wasn’t back in the room by the time Cleo headed up, after Matty had paid the tab. (He insisted, then also admitted he was dating a twenty-seven-year-old, and then it was her turn to redden because Cleo had evidently wildly misread his intentions.) Afterward, in front of the elevator bank, they had hugged; he told her not to be a stranger. She promised that she wouldn’t, and unlike her promises to Georgie, she thought—she hoped—this was one she could keep.
“It’s funny,” he said to her after he kissed her cheek, “how people can come in and out of your lives after so many years away and how maybe they matter in different ways than they used to.”
“So I have your vote?” Cleo joked because Matty was being sincere again, and though she really, really wanted to appreciate that side of him, she also wasn’t used to nearly anyone in her orbit ringing with sincerity. Sure, she was passionate about some of her pet issues—school funding and equal pay and all that—but sincerity also meant vulnerability, and vulnerability in politics meant blood.
“You have my vote,” he said. “And now you have my cell. So call anytime.”
“I will.” She nodded, and she remembered again how wonderful he had been when her parents died, and so she repeated, “I will.”
In her room, Cleo pulled off her violet blouse and jeans, folded them in her suitcase, and grabbed her pajamas, which she’d hung in the closet. She preferred them to be unwrinkled; she didn’t really know why. Lucas made fun of this, but he balled up all his clothes and dumped them in the corner of his room, so he was in no position to judge.
It was nearly one thirty in the morning East Coast time, so she should have been tired. But everyone knew that Cleo McDougal could run on coffee fumes and ambition, a habit honed early, mostly out of necessity when Lucas was a baby and it was just the two of them. Now this was one of her strong suits within the Senate—not her lack of sleep but her grit, her determination, her ability to work through just about anything.
Like her world upending when the police came to MaryAnne’s house that night of the helicopter crash, because they’d already tried her own home, and told her the news. She and MaryAnne had been poring over U.S. News & World Report college rankings and assessing where they had the best shot. Then MaryAnne’s mother opened the bedroom door, looking like she was about to faint, and then the police guided Cleo to their living room couch, and that was that. Georgie flew up from Los Angeles the next morning and . . . Cleo tried to remember where she had slept that night, at her grandmother’s or at MaryAnne’s. It came to her—she’d slept at her own house that night, her childhood one. She was hysterical, of course. It was the last time she’d truly ever come undone, and she had refused to go to her grandmother’s. MaryAnne’s mother wasn’t sure what to do, so they drove back to her own house, and MaryAnne lay beside her in Cleo’s twin bed, and Cleo shook from the shock of it, her whole body quaking all night. And then they rose at dawn, and Cleo got into her parents’ bed, which smelled like her mother’s shampoo and her father’s aftershave, and she kept crying, unable to stop even if she’d wanted to.
Eventually MaryAnne’s mother had arrived and packed Cleo a suitcase and