had diverged well before he came along. What could she possibly be writing about?
Cleo patted her pockets, in a slightly more desperate search for her own phone now, then realized it was still in her home office / boxing studio / guest room (though they never had guests), resting, waiting, recharging, like it wasn’t an imminent time bomb.
Lucas pulled his screen closer, read the opening lines.
“Cleo McDougal is not a good person. She does good, yes, but doing good and being good aren’t the same thing, now, are they? In fact, her whole life, Cleo McDougal has been a cheater. She cheated in high school, on the debate team, on the school paper, for a summer internship, and from there it only got worse.”
“That is not true,” Cleo said to Lucas. Though maybe it was, just a little? Leave it to MaryAnne to thread the needle between rumor and fact. Cleo almost snorted, it was so familiar.
“Keep reading,” he said, passing his phone across the counter.
Cleo skimmed the next paragraph, detailing old grudges that felt irrelevant twenty years later, until she saw it. The reason for the hint of whatever it was in Lucas’s eyes.
“I have recently learned that this pattern of cheating extends all the way to Cleo’s personal life. I support women and their myriad choices, but when these choices reflect on their moral and ethical compass—something we must all agree is critical for presidential material—it bears stating publicly. A reliable source recently reached out to me, knowing we grew up together, to disclose that while at law school, Cleo had a torrid affair with a married professor, and, I quote here, ‘many people have since suspected that he could be the father of her son.’ I share this information not to shame her—”
Cleo slammed down the phone; she didn’t need to read further. Of course MaryAnne would play the smug card! she thought. That. Conniving. Bitch, she also thought.
“Is that true?” Lucas’s voice was softer now, more like the kid he used to be, less like the man he nearly was. Cleo’s stomach nearly leaped through her throat.
“No. Sweetie, no.” Cleo reached out and mussed his hair, which he did not particularly like and which did not play nearly as naturally as Cleo hoped, a ruse to buy her time. “You know that isn’t right—I was already pregnant at law school. MaryAnne is just passing on gossip that she didn’t even bother to fact-check. I assume that’s why she published it in . . .” Cleo batted her hand around, as if she were shooing a fly. “Whatever this ridiculous excuse for a news website is.”
Lucas chewed his lip and digested this. They’d been over this—his father. They’d had long discussions about it, and damn you, MaryAnne Newman, for bringing this back into their lives all over again. Cleo had settled it for Lucas—that his dad wasn’t involved and didn’t want to be, and that it was just the two of them, it had always been just the two of them, and that was fine. Lucas used to ask more questions about it when he was younger, but lately they’d somehow silently agreed that, like many things, especially in DC, where alliances were often fluid, it was ancient history. His father wasn’t around, and that was that, and Cleo and Lucas were peas in a pod. (They weren’t really, now that Lucas was an ornery teenager, but Cleo tried to remember that this was all very developmentally normal.)
“So who’s MaryAnne Newman? And why would she write this?”
Cleo blew out her breath. She tried to tell herself that she was more perplexed than alarmed, but that wasn’t really true. She was alarmed. She was shocked out of her brains and also terrified too. How on earth had MaryAnne Newman heard about Alexander Nobells? Gaby and her whole team of advisors—Cleo had a staff of thirty-five in her DC office alone—had warned her: if you toy with a run for the presidency, everyone will emerge, cockroaches and rats and all sorts of vermin from your past, to share their own stories. But Cleo had led a (mostly) clean life. There was Lucas, of course, the unplanned pregnancy her senior year at Northwestern—not at law school, thank you, MaryAnne—but she’d kept him! And she’d loved him! And she’d raised him! So no one on either side of the aisle could point fingers. She’d tried to make the best choices—strategic choices, true—but also at least decently moral choices (there was a