that’s what turned you into a leader.
“I don’t know,” she said, pulling on her sunglasses, arming herself for what came next. “But sometimes making it right is just what you do, even if you don’t know what happens after.”
Bowen watched the child disappear around the corner of the block, the mom still flying after her. Something passed between Cleo and Bowen then, an understanding that he wasn’t her savior, and she wasn’t asking him to be either.
“I’ll follow your lead,” he said.
“Only forward!” she replied but found that the intended humor belly flopped, neither of them in the mood for jokes.
Tracking Nobells down was the easiest part. Cleo still had an alumni log-in, so she quickly accessed his lecture schedule and office hours, which remained the same as they had been more than a decade ago. Maybe it shouldn’t have been such a surprise. He, like her, was methodical and by the book (until he wasn’t). Of course, she couldn’t be certain that he’d be there. She reminded herself of this as she felt her pulse palpably accelerate as they drew closer. People change, habits deviate. But she remembered that he used to love spending Saturdays on campus, usually tucked in his office reading, away from the chaos of his family. Though technically these weren’t his official office hours, he made it known—or he had certainly made it known to Cleo anyway—that students were welcome to disturb him. She didn’t want to show up at his apartment; that wasn’t the sort of score she wanted to settle. Besides, this felt like neutral territory, in his old office, on their old campus, now that she was a senator. The balance of power having been leveled.
Cleo and Bowen reached the campus on 116th Street. Undergrad was still in session, wrapping up in the weeks as spring ebbed into summer, and younger versions of who she used to be scurried around them everywhere, backpacks weighing down their shoulders, messy buns atop their heads, iced coffees on hand to push them through their weekend cram sessions.
Cleo looked for the single mothers, the ones pushing infants or toddlers, with purple circles under their eyes and stains on their T-shirts. She saw none. She reminded herself that at Northwestern, in fact, she’d been unencumbered. No Lucas just yet. Not even a notion of him. If you’d asked her who in her life would have gotten pregnant her senior year of college, she would have said anyone but me. And yet, her fourteen-year-old was currently two hundred miles away at a pool party for his soccer team, so Cleo was starting to understand that she was not the best narrator of her own story.
“This way,” Cleo said to Bowen and pointed toward Greene Hall, which was a rectangular slab of concrete with more slabs of concrete running vertically through it. There had been a long-standing on-campus argument as to whether it was a hideous eyesore or a beloved near–work of art. Though at the time Cleo had sided with eyesore, she now viewed it from afar with affection, even with her growing nerves and her hard-to-ignore flop sweat. (To be fair, this morning’s humidity had given way to a sincere heat wave, and with not a cloud in the Manhattan sky, Cleo felt as if she were walking on the surface of the sun.) Beside her, Bowen swept his hand through his hair, which stayed aloft, right in the same position where his hand had exited, held there by his own perspiration.
Cleo swung the door open to Greene Hall and was met with the blessed blast of air-conditioning. “Oh sweet Jesus,” she said.
“And you tell me you’re not religious,” Bowen replied, then let out a little moan of his own.
Nobells’s office was on the sixth floor, so they wound their way through the lobby, garnering a few glances, but Bowen more than her. Senators might be celebrities in DC because they wielded power, but here, in New York City, his star-power star outshone hers. He waved to three girls giggling by the elevator bank before the two of them ducked inside.
“Press six,” she said. She was too nervous to do so. She wondered if she even had feeling in her arms. She lifted them to test it, and yes, demonstrably, her brain still connected to her limbs, so at least that was set. Bowen watched her raise her arms like a zombie, then lower them to her sides. She did it again.
“Are you sure you’re OK?” He