delivered her to her grandmother’s, and Cleo wept for three days straight. She stopped eating, and her grandmother fretted, and Georgie, now a responsible adult with a thriving life-coach practice, tried to intervene, but Cleo was also nearly a grown-up by then, and she was strong enough to push them away, to lock herself in her grandmother’s guest room and insist that they let her mourn on her own and fend for herself. It wasn’t a conscious choice back then to spurn their generosity. Cleo was in shock and adrift; her whole world had been their little insular triangle, Mom and Dad and her, and without this formation, Cleo didn’t know who she was. When two sides of a triangle collapse, you’re just left with a solitary straight line. Cleo remembered this now—lying on a bed at her grandmother’s and literally envisioning herself as a flat black line, and she had stared at the ceiling and considered what her parents would want her to do now. To weep, to mourn, or to get the hell up and light the world on fire. And she knew that it was the latter. So she stopped crying and resolved that her tears were a weakness, and she went to the funeral and sat dry-eyed. It was as if she had channeled her grief into stoicism, and from there Cleo channeled this stoicism and her ability to power through straight into her veins.
You get what you get. You do what you have to do. You stop crying. You stop sleeping. You turn yourself into someone to be reckoned with. You become a straight line, and then you become an arrow.
Tucked into the hotel duvet, Cleo logged on to Facebook on her phone. She clicked out of the app and then checked Lucas’s location. (Yes, she tracked his phone. Emily Godwin had suggested it, and it had never seemed smarter than now.) He was still at the coffee place. Surely it would close soon. Surely he couldn’t be falling in love with MaryAnne Newman’s daughter. Cleo tapped the Facebook app again. She didn’t want to tell Lucas whom he could and couldn’t fall in love with, but she might have to.
She scrolled through Matty’s page and his photos—he liked to fish in the summers in Idaho evidently and also had a dog whose breed was undeterminable. There was a recent picture with a woman, probably the twenty-seven-year-old, at a Coldplay concert, and all this just seemed so Matty. He was right, she thought; she was not the type of girl who went to Coldplay concerts and fished in Idaho, so maybe they never really would have worked. But maybe that kind of life would have been nice, even for a long weekend, even for an occasional long-distance romance. She knew that if she told Gaby about how he showed up and they had a few drinks and she rested her head on his shoulder, that she—Gaby of her firm no-kids policy and her likely no-marriage policy too—would squeal and think that maybe this was the start of something. You can be a staunch independent feminist and still love a Kate Hudson rom-com. But Cleo knew she would never be the heroine in a romantic comedy. She just wouldn’t. She’d made her peace with that years ago. When she left Northwestern on her own with a baby growing inside her.
She typed MaryAnne’s name into her search bar, clicked on her profile. She found herself inhaling deeply, as if she were about to get her flu shot or a gut punch or terrible polling numbers (which, incidentally, she never got—her home state loved her) and was steeling herself for it.
The lock on the hotel door beeped, then unlatched, and Cleo threw her phone to the foot of the bed.
“Hey,” Lucas said. “How was your night? Anything exciting happen?” He flopped belly-down on his own bed, then angled his face toward her.
“Very funny.”
Lucas propped himself up on his elbows. “What? Did something happen?”
Now it was Cleo’s rare chance to roll her eyes at him. “I know that you messaged Matty, OK? The jig is up.”
Lucas swung his feet out toward the floor and sat up. “Don’t be mad. I just . . . I don’t know, it’s kind of pathetic how you have no life.”
“This coming from a kid who is literally locked in his room when he’s not at school or soccer.”
“But I have a life, Mom. Also, that’s entirely age-appropriate—teenage boys are supposed to lock themselves