didn’t often wilt in the face of political pressure but occasionally, yes. She never liked it, was never proud of it, but polling mattered, plain and simple. The only way you ensured that you got to stand up and fight for your constituents was knowing that from time to time, you had to take a seat to preserve your job.
“But now you can look like a champion, at least in the eyes of Veronica Kaye.”
The free housing bill was a controversial proposal that Cleo had been asked to cosponsor the year prior. It recommended sweeping new legislation for lower-income families who, if they could demonstrate five years of steady employment, at least one child elementary-school age or older, and a clean criminal record, could apply for either a free home renovation or a free home, period. It had its detractors, of course: cries that giving away things for free was not the American Way!, and further cries that housing was a temporary Band-Aid for larger, systemic problems in poorer neighborhoods. But Cleo had disagreed. She’d read the research and thought that stability started with a solid roof over someone’s head, with a rodent-free kitchen, with water that didn’t turn brown from the pipes. Still, her staff had polled her voters, and it was a disaster—positive numbers in the low thirties, and even though Cleo knew it was probably the right thing to do, she demurred when asked to sign on.
“I’ll reach out to Senator Jackman and see if we can revive it,” Cleo said.
“And I’ll be sure to let the press know when you do.”
“I’d expect nothing less.” Cleo nodded. “Though, I mean, we’re not going to film that.” She thought of Senator Jackman, a perfectly coiffed, straight-spined sixty-four-year-old ballbuster from the great state of Illinois. As open-minded as she was, she also came from a generation that cared about etiquette, and Cleo was certain she’d nix Gaby’s guerrilla-style filmmaking as she and Cleo hashed out the details. Besides, that type of policy work was the opposite of sexy. It would die on the internet vine unless the two of them ended up in some sort of salacious choke hold.
“No, we’re not going to film that,” Gaby said. “But it can still be a feather in your cap, a reconsideration, a regret addressed all the same.” She clicked her tongue. “That leaves us with two more. Give me the day, and I’ll let you know what’s next.”
“You told me we were doing all this on my recess,” Cleo argued. “In case you’ve forgotten, I’m not yet running for president, and I have to represent the people of New York in other matters right now, and who even said I want to do this?”
Gaby froze, literally, her hand in midair, her eyes as wide as globes. “You don’t want to run for president?”
“My regrets,” Cleo snapped. “After MaryAnne has gone so well, can we at least have a conversation about if I even want to do four more?”
Yesterday’s Seattle Post-Intelligencer still sat folded on her desk. She’d meant to ask Lucas last night if he’d gotten any further intel from Esme, but he’d had on his noise-canceling headphones and was so focused on his homework (she hoped it was his homework—perhaps she should more accurately say, so focused on his laptop) that she didn’t want to disturb him. Besides, she hadn’t yet figured out how to respond to the ad, much less to whatever was next in MaryAnne’s arsenal.
“The regrets list is what got Veronica here in the first place,” Gaby said.
“No, not the list, because she doesn’t know about that,” Cleo said. “Confirming?”
“Fine, the act of embracing said regrets. The semantics of it doesn’t matter, OK?” She grabbed the newspaper from Cleo’s desk and threw it—somewhat dramatically, Cleo thought—into the garbage can.
“Gab, you can’t just throw it away and act like there aren’t reverberations. That’s not how this works. That’s the very point of the list. That I did something and maybe there were ramifications. A lot of times, toward me. Some stupid stuff, like not finishing my antibiotics, but some other stuff too, like torpedoing MaryAnne’s internship.” Cleo sighed. “Just because you do that doesn’t make the ad disappear or the mess with MaryAnne disappear either. Besides, people already like me. Why risk that?”
“People like you enough, that’s true. But now we’re going to make them love you.”
“I never needed anyone to love me,” Cleo said.
“Well, maybe that’s where you’re shortsighted,” Gaby replied.
TEN
The truth was that even outside of