them all. Cleo chastised herself: before MaryAnne blew this up, she’d never, ever have read the comments!
Susan Harris, Maureen Allen, and Beth Shin were still particularly worked up. They were using words like angry and bitchy and too tough for her own good. It was amazing, Cleo thought, her thumb scrolling downward through the comments, how society had done this—conditioned women to eat their own likenesses so they didn’t realize that if they banded together, they’d be unstoppable. Cleo’s thumb hovered as it struck her: she had done exactly the same thing to MaryAnne.
“Shit,” she said aloud. “Just fucking shit.” As an adult, and especially in Congress, Cleo had been careful never to alienate another female congresswoman (there still weren’t that many of them) and truly didn’t see women as competition. But maybe that lesson was learned only after she’d stepped on a few shoulders (and a few aspirations) to ascend the ladder to her current position. “Shit,” she said again.
She exited out of MaryAnne’s page and clicked over to Matty’s. He’d taken his twenty-seven-year-old girlfriend to Snoqualmie Falls for the weekend. There were lots of pictures of them hiking and eating hearty meals with jams and bacons and honeys. This made her a little sad—for him because it seemed like maybe he could use someone more complicated, and also for her, Cleo, because maybe she could have used someone simpler. Regret. She made a mental note to send him a gift basket from an amazing fishery that her colleague from Alaska was always heralding. It seemed like the type of thing Matty would get a kick out of—a delivery of salmon from Alaska on dry ice! She grinned, just thinking about the look of pure joy on his face. Then she recalculated: maybe she didn’t know anything about his girlfriend and whether or not she were simple or easy or right for Matty, and who was she to make snap judgments when she had just wished that everyone else would stop making them about her? Still, though, she’d send the salmon.
She checked the time and realized she was late, so she did her makeup in a hurry and scrambled out the door to meet Bowen, who was punctual and greeted her with a hug, which she did not recoil from.
“We can just walk from here, if that’s OK,” Cleo said as they started up Amsterdam Avenue.
“You’re the boss,” he said. “Though I’m still not quite getting this.”
“I told you,” she said, because she had told him on the train. “It’s about accountability.”
“Whose?” Bowen grabbed her elbow as she started to cross without a light, but then the traffic slowed and he let go and they crossed together, side by side. “And why?”
Cleo sighed. On the surface, without explaining the regrets list, maybe it did sound crazy: digging up the worst of yourself from your past, facing it publicly. But Bowen didn’t push it—he wanted the story, she knew: prominent senator confronts the man who may or may not have taken advantage of her a decade earlier—these stories were en vogue and generated eyeballs and frenzied Twitter threads and buoyant comments sections too. But he also wanted to protect her. She could sense that even without him saying so. I don’t need protection, she wanted to tell him. Single moms who have clawed their way up and through and beyond have long learned how to protect themselves.
Cleo didn’t want Bowen, or even Gaby, to tell her how to stay safe in a storm. She didn’t want Matty to ask who looked out for her. She did. That was just how it had been since she was seventeen.
Besides, sometimes you choose you. Bowen had every right to choose himself over her, to go for the story. If Cleo had been in the same position, she’d have done the same.
“I’m just trying to make it right,” she said.
“Make it right for whom?” They both did a little dance to the side of the sidewalk when a child blasted by them too fast on a scooter. Her mom yelled out from half a block away, sprinting to keep up.
Cleo thought of her list. She thought of MaryAnne. She thought of those two girls this morning. She thought of Emily Godwin and of Jonathan with his hand on the curve of another woman’s back. She thought of how angry Gaby would be that she was doing this without her. She thought of Veronica Kaye, who told her to lean in to difficult choices because