she caught him in a lie about his voting record, and not only was she raked over the media coals for ten days straight, she lost her upcoming reelection. Her challenger Photoshopped the video of her at the hearing such that she resembled a witch on a broom and ran ads with the image the last two weeks of the campaign. He won by seven percentage points.
So Cleo was understandably torn at the blowback against MaryAnne Newman.
Gaby, however, was not.
“I am going to fuck that bitch up,” she said. She’d sent out one of their staffers, Timothy, to the newsstand that stocked the papers from all fifty states, as well as countries across the world, and she was staring down at the open paper on Cleo’s desk. “Like, seriously. I could kill her. Kill her.”
“You can’t kill her,” Cleo said.
“True, I’m a black woman in America. I could be arrested just for saying that.” Gaby paused, only half joking. “We’ll enlist Timothy. He’s white, Harvard-educated, and twenty-eight. He’ll be out of jail in three months, if he’s convicted at all.”
Cleo pulled a sheet of paper from her bag. She couldn’t sleep last night, not after Lucas announced the declaration of war and certainly not after more obfuscation about his dad. Cleo knew the mess was her own making—perhaps not all the MaryAnne stuff, because MaryAnne was happily digging her own hole deeper, but the father stuff, well, sure. So she had plunked down at her desk, and she had taken another hard look at those 233 regrets, and she had written down ten before she could talk herself out of it.
“Here,” she said and shoved the paper at Gaby. “Ten. As demanded.”
“As requested,” Gaby corrected.
“Same thing coming from you.”
“True,” Gaby demurred, glancing over her options. “Hmm, OK, OK, no, OK, oh yes, that one for sure.” She looked up, met Cleo’s eyes. “There are some things we can work with here. You really want to dance?”
“No,” Cleo snapped. “I don’t really want to dance. But you made me write down ten regrets, and I thought that pursuing something creative in the public eye was better than tracking down Lucas’s father in the public eye, so does that satisfy you?”
Gaby’s eyebrows skyrocketed as Cleo’s intercom buzzed.
“Senator McDougal?” Arianna still always sounded like she was apologizing. Cleo grabbed a pen, wrote down, Speak with Arianna about her tone!, and underlined it twice to remind herself. Arianna wasn’t going to get far in politics, in any career, if she couldn’t quell that upward tick, that question mark. Women who were constantly apologizing were at a disadvantage in any negotiation and, of course, taken less seriously, because who wants advice or counsel from someone who is sorry before they’ve even convinced you of anything?
“Yes, Arianna.”
“Veronica Kaye is here? Um. Now. She’s outside?”
Gaby’s face went slack, and the blood drained from Cleo’s.
“Shit!” Gaby said.
“Shit,” Cleo said too.
“I wanted to have time to tell her our plan,” Gaby was whispering again, a sure sign of her highly unusual and extremely rare panic. “Shit, shit, shit.”
“Our plan?”
“The regrets plan! That’s what she wanted from us; that’s what got her here.”
“Shit. OK, go with dancing.”
Gaby looked even more alarmed.
“I am not a complete rhythmically challenged imbecile, Gaby,” Cleo bleated. “My mom was a professional ballerina. It’s in me somewhere!”
“OK, OK, we’ll go with that.” Gaby smoothed out her sweater, grabbed a lipstick (Veronica Kaye Fire Engine Red!), and puckered up. “Here.” She thrust it toward Cleo. “You need more help than this, but it won’t hurt.”
Veronica Kaye swooped in and smelled, frankly, heavenly. It was the first thing Cleo noticed: her scent. Not just that the tones were perfect, some magical blend of vanilla bean and gardenia and perhaps a touch of grapefruit, but she also reeked of power. Cleo sized her up and genuinely thought she was the most intoxicating, most impressive woman she’d ever seen. And Cleo had met heads of state, ambassadors, prime ministers, and, of course, other senators (there were seventeen total, to the eighty-three men). Gaby was nearly salivating. It was hard to quantify who was more stupefied, but together their collective awe spoke to the way that Veronica Kaye commanded a room.
Of course, she was also beautiful, though neither Cleo nor Gaby would have led with that. Praising a woman for her beauty was so retro that it was uncouth. But still, she was. Stunning. As the CEO of the largest cosmetics company in the world, she needed to be, but she