bit of a stink.” Gaby paused, still scrolling. “She was interviewed on their own local news today . . . and . . .” Scrolling. “She shared the ridiculous op-ed on Facebook, which I guess was seen by some of your old classmates.” She tapped her phone. “Hmm. OK, well, some of your classmates are defending you but . . . hmm, OK, wow, well, some of them are not.”
“Tell me something I don’t already know.”
Gaby sighed. Rested her phone in her lap next to her takeout container with the half-eaten omelet.
“So, Cleo, I love you. You know that. I will work with you forever and tirelessly, and I believe that you can and should be president. Even before forty.”
“What’s the ‘but’ coming?”
“But we’ve never really had the conversation about your past.”
“I don’t have a past,” Cleo said. Her muffin was becoming much less appealing.
“Everyone has a past, Clee.”
“Well, obviously.”
“What I mean is, you didn’t have liabilities in your New York race because no one cared all that much. New York wanted you, and they loved you, and it wasn’t even close. But this time it will be different.”
Cleo nodded. This wasn’t her first rodeo. In fact, it would technically be her sixth. Three congressional races, two senatorial.
“I’m not a dummy,” she said. “I know what I’m in for.”
“Then I need to know what I’m in for,” Gabrielle said. “I can’t protect you if I don’t know. Why would MaryAnne mention some married professor? I get that the timing is off with Lucas, but that doesn’t seem pulled from thin air.”
Cleo laughed but not her normal laugh, and they both knew it. It was her nervous laugh that she’d use whenever she needed to give herself a moment to strategize. It wasn’t actually all that often that she needed it. She was almost always prepared (a cable commentator once said too prepared) and rarely caught off guard, and besides, she had other ways to distract and deflect. All politicians did. Point fingers elsewhere, blame the other party, cite oppo research, take a fact and spin it so dizzily that no one even really knows what you’re talking about by the end and thus drops it. But none of this would work on Gabrielle. She was too smart, she was too close, and also, she was one of Cleo’s few dear, true, trusted friends. Probably her only one, actually. Cleo did not have a wide network of girlfriends, for reasons MaryAnne’s only partially accurate op-ed made clear.
Cleo exhaled, long, slow, measured. “I mean, listen, I have moments of regret.”
“Who doesn’t?”
“Right, so? So what? Then there’s nothing.”
Gaby’s phone buzzed, then buzzed again, but she didn’t even peek. “So if I peel back this onion with MaryAnne and the rest of this, there’ll be nothing there? I personally don’t care whom you’ve slept with. The electorate . . . may.”
“MaryAnne is, like, the president of her country club,” Cleo said, as if this had anything to do with anything.
“And those women are exactly who you need,” Gaby said, not incorrectly. “Thus . . . the affair?” She squinted, capturing a thought. “But I knew you in law school, and I swear, you were never getting laid.”
Cleo raised her eyebrows as if to say: Exactly. She hoped Gaby would let it go at that.
“Fine, whatever, but even you mentioning ‘regrets’ raises the hairs on my neck.” Gaby leveled her gaze, and Cleo knew she was giving her one chance to tell her version of the truth before this went any further: into a real campaign launch, into a confrontation with MaryAnne, into a war with the press. Gaby was not the type of woman who liked to be caught unaware in the middle of a fistfight.
“Fine. Listen. My dad. He and I started something when I was younger. My mom thought it was . . .” Cleo hesitated, remembering. “Well, my mom thought it was ‘a tornado of negative energy,’ that’s what she would always say. ‘Why are you getting caught up in that negative energy? Go focus on just being a superstar!’” Cleo smiled at this because her parents had been diametrical opposites who also fit together perfectly. They’d had her late—Cleo always assumed that she was an accident, but she was never old enough or bold enough to ask. And they loved her so very much, so what did it matter? She was, they always told her, their shining star.
And then they were gone.
“So what was the negative energy?” Gaby brought her