to really give up much ground. Also, this wasn’t the part of the romantic comedy where Kate Hudson started fighting with her best friend. It wasn’t even a romantic comedy, actually. Bowen Babson hadn’t even fucking kissed her.
“Also, there’s something else to consider, which really, honestly, Clee, I wish you’d come to me first.”
“What is it?” Cleo didn’t have any fight left in her either.
“This whole film-before-you-think culture, well, people are wondering if you made Nobells look guilty without giving him a chance to defend himself.”
Cleo felt the blood drain from her face. “He is guilty; he was guilty. I have emails! Bowen vetted it before we did anything!”
“We’ll see how that plays out, I guess. And I should say it’s not all terrible. A lot of it isn’t, actually. I’m running some internals, trying to see where your voters would come down. It seems like you’ve locked up women. The men, well . . .” Gaby flipped her hand at the implication. “Of course.”
“I’m not interested in internals, Gaby. This is my life, not a policy issue. I thought that was the point? I thought you wanted to make me look . . . less robotic; isn’t that what you said? Exploit my gumption, if I were to quote Veronica Kaye?”
“I just don’t want anyone calling you crazy.”
Cleo folded her hands underneath her chin. “Aren’t they going to call me crazy anyway? Isn’t that just what people do? To a young woman—”
“Youngish.”
“To a youngish woman who is considering running for president? Isn’t that just what people are going to do?”
Cleo thought of Lucas then, and for the first time really did understand why this was excruciating for him. Her past, her sex life, the gossip, the way she went about it without giving him any warning. She had thought she was protecting him by slipping to New York and leaving him to his idyllic soccer pool party, but he wasn’t a child now. She could see why it felt more like a betrayal. She needed to pay better attention to him, she realized, her heart splitting open just a little. She needed to recalibrate her life to ensure that it was in sync with his. If it wasn’t, what was the purpose of this whole thing?
Gaby lost herself for a beat too. “I have to ask: we were friends in law school. Good friends, I thought. Why wouldn’t you tell me? Why did I have to first hear the hints of this from MaryAnne Newman’s op-ed, and I mean, how the hell did she even know?” Gaby looked pained at Cleo’s exclusion, at her silence. Cleo saw it in the wince of her eyes, the hunch of her shoulders.
“I don’t know,” Cleo said. And she really didn’t. In law school it was probably out of shame, first for the affair, then out of the notion that perhaps someone could think she was benefitting from the affair, and then, finally, because of how humiliating it had been when he ended it. In the years since, likely because it was easier to stuff it down and move on. That was how Cleo got through just about everything. “I didn’t tell anyone. Hadn’t told anyone until this weekend. I have no idea about MaryAnne other than she was always an excellent gossip. She would have made a kick-ass reporter, to be honest.”
“You could have told me. I wouldn’t have judged you,” Gaby said.
“It wasn’t about judgment,” Cleo replied, though maybe it was. Women judged other women all the time. Just ask Susan and Maureen and Beth, who had made up their minds about Cleo two decades ago and also how she probably made up her mind about them too. “I was just protecting myself, I guess.”
“I think you were protecting him,” Gaby suggested, rising, ready to get on with their day.
Cleo thought about that for a long time after Gaby left, after she’d drunk the coffee Arianna had brewed, after Gaby returned and said that internals for women were looking even stronger than she anticipated but that the blowback was poised to be formidable too. Cleo thought about how tangled up it can all get, love and ambition and life and sex and doubt and acceptance and loneliness and, yes, regret. And how sometimes, in the mix of all that, you no longer see yourself clearly and instead you start to view yourself through someone else’s lens, for better and also for worse. Cleo was lucky enough to have disentangled herself from