“Knit your own damn hat,” Cleo said. “Also, how on earth would I know how to knit? Do I look like someone who has time to take up knitting?”
“Point taken,” Bowen acknowledged. “But . . . this isn’t just about that. It’s about something else too. And the reporter in me wants to know why.”
Cleo was tired and didn’t want to rehash what she’d shared on the train, which had been about as honest as she could reasonably expect herself to be while also not being completely honest. So she’d told him the stuff about Nobells—about the shame she had repressed over the affair (MaryAnne did get that right) and about the power he held over her when it ended. He had listened as thoughtfully as he’d listen to one of the guests on his show, interrupting only to ask imperative questions, and in this way he reminded her of Matty: a deeper thinker than the surface would suggest. And just as she had reevaluated Matty back in the bar in Seattle, she had found herself reconsidering Bowen as the train whipped through the northeast landscape to New York.
Still, though, now was not the time to consider even a hint of that attraction. Over the years, Cleo had become an expert in talking herself out of romantic connections—thus, her dating life almost never went past three dinners and/or occasionally fooling around. Romance was messy and unnecessary, and she wasn’t looking for a husband or another child and certainly not gossip headlines, so she compartmentalized romance the way she would, say, buy fresh flowers. They’d be nice to have, but no one ever couldn’t get by without them. She relegated making out with Bowen to buying flowers. That was that.
“Seriously, Cleo, why are you doing this?” Bowen asked again.
She sipped her Diet Coke and thought of all those nights at Pagliacci’s with MaryAnne, draining their cups and going for refills. Bowen wanted to know why, and she wasn’t even sure herself. Why had she done a million things in her life? She just pointed herself north and went, especially after her parents died—following the ambition in her gut. But this time it wasn’t about that. This time it felt like she was running counter to that ambition. This time it felt personal. Why? Because she had caught Jonathan Godwin leaving the HRC dinner with a young replacement for Emily? That was too easy. Maybe it was because once MaryAnne aired the truth, Cleo couldn’t repress her shame any longer. She couldn’t tout herself as a role model for Arianna and her generation while also having wronged Nobells’s wife and having been a pawn in his game. Maybe it was time to address the power imbalance that ran top to bottom through not just the legal profession but educational systems too, and a million other systems beyond that. Or maybe it was simpler than all that: maybe it was just that Gaby, though she would be angry to know Cleo was running this show without her right now, was pushing her to face her regrets in order to launch a presidential bid, and Nobells simply couldn’t be ignored.
She could have chosen about a hundred other regrets from her list, though, and she hadn’t. And she’d come this far—literally about two hundred miles—to do it. But why now? Why this? Cleo wasn’t emotionally intelligent enough to clarify the heart of the why for Bowen. It wasn’t that she didn’t want to; it was that she couldn’t.
She shook her head as he watched her. She wasn’t about to tell him about her list. That was too far, too much, like stripping herself naked in front of him and pointing out all her flaws, asking him to circle them with a Sharpie.
Instead, she said, because this was also true, “Maybe it’s just time.”
She raised her shoulders, then lowered them, and though she understood he wanted more from her, he was also keen enough to accept that, for now, this was the most she had to offer.
Though Cleo expected Bowen to have fancy plans—a nightclub or, at the very least, dinner at the Soho House—he was happy, eager, almost, to stick around the apartment, loitering as if there were nowhere else he’d rather be. He hunched over, peered at pictures that lined her bookshelves—mostly of Lucas over the years, a few of her parents too. Cleo tried to relax and be, well, normal, that he was here, in her space, but she was not