more insulting than anything else. She had known the whole time that she didn’t love him. She didn’t expect him to leave Amy and the children; she didn’t envision moving into his three-bedroom. She did, however, expect respect, and when he scurried down the street, fleeing past her as if they weren’t neighbors and this sort of thing might happen, and then he emailed her and said it would be for the best if their arrangement ended, well, that’s when Cleo McDougal realized what an insouciant piece of misogynistic garbage Alexander Nobells was. That after eight months, he’d peg her as a crazy stalker. That after eight months, she wasn’t worth more than an email. He added at the end of it that he was proud to be part of her story, to have contributed to her next chapters. And Cleo started to reply back: FUCK YOU, YOU DO NOT GET TO CLAIM OWNERSHIP OVER MY SUCCESS, but she decided that flaunting how wildly she would succeed without him was perhaps the best revenge. And she had.
It was only the next day that she got a second email—revoking her summer position at his firm. And then the third email, from the dean of the law school, who had offered to put her in touch with the New York attorney general, in case Cleo wanted to pursue that path, rescinding the offer, ostensibly under the guise that the AG was “underwater right now” and “perhaps we can revisit this down the road.” But Cleo knew they weren’t going to revisit it. And Cleo knew that Nobells had torched her.
And that’s when he went from being a philandering asshole to a vindictive one. So she had scrambled. All the summer positions were locked up by then, obviously. None of the big firms was hiring, and besides, they’d want to know why she’d been let go at the other one. She made phone call after phone call in her two-bedroom apartment, while Lucas slept or was at day care or toddled around in a Pull-Up singing “Itsy Bitsy Spider” and spilling Cheerios, until finally, because they sounded as desperate as she was, she landed an interview at a women’s health nonprofit. It paid next to nothing and was not the shining star she wanted for her résumé. But ironically, it pushed her into public service—it was gratifying in ways that reviewing briefs for law partners could never be, and it helped Cleo see that her privileged voice could perhaps help less-privileged ones. Her next step out of law school was running for Congress.
So maybe she had Alexander Nobells to thank for everything after all.
But she wouldn’t. Because he’d tried to cut her off at the knees, and she had risen to her feet anyway. So fuck him.
“How many others, Alexander?” Cleo felt bolder now, more like herself, not the version of her she had been in his shadow. More like the girl she had been at twenty-four, rising.
“None, Cleo, none.”
“I am a fucking senator, so you can address me as such,” she said, though she wished she hadn’t sworn, because she knew Bowen was behind her, doing what she’d asked.
“Calm down, please.” He moved to put his hands on her shoulders, just as he had so many years ago in the precipice of his classroom. Cleo was faster, though, and stepped aside. “Look, I can see that you are quite upset,” he offered.
“Don’t tell me that I am upset,” she said. “Don’t tell me to stay calm.”
“Well”—he opened his palms toward her—“it appears to me that you are very much upset.”
Cleo wasn’t surprised that he went for the overly emotional patronizing bullshit. He wasn’t the first man to be on the losing end of an argument to do so. He wasn’t even the hundredth, the thousandth.
“You tried to alienate me; you tried to wreck me.”
His voice dropped to a lower register, a menacing one. “You enjoyed yourself in my bedroom, Senator.”
“I was a twenty-three-year-old who was stunned that her professor took an interest.”
Nobells recalculated, softening. “What do you want from me? Amy left me three years ago. Are you here to seek revenge? To tell me that I was an unfaithful husband?”
Cleo thought of Jonathan Godwin. No, this wasn’t just about that. It was about protecting another second-year student who might not be as game when he ran his hand down her arm outside the classroom but felt obligated to accept his dinner invitation nonetheless; it was about stomping out the perversions of