She pressed the buzzer one more time, praying feverishly that Gaby had gotten her intel wrong, and MaryAnne was currently enjoying the beaches of Maui or the mountains of Whistler or wherever she would whisk her family off to avoid the scrutiny of the press glare from the op-ed. Then Cleo recalibrated: MaryAnne would never shy away from the spotlight. She’d shared the op-ed on her Facebook page! Of course she was in town. Cleo was surprised the front door wasn’t flung wide open, with MaryAnne welcoming the inquirers with homemade shortbread and Earl Grey tea. She may have been planning a parade to celebrate. It was easy to envision this, after all, because if Cleo had charted the same course as MaryAnne (country club president rather than senator), it’s what she would have done exactly.

Before she could consider this, the Sliding Doors possibilities of their lives, she heard footsteps coming too quickly, then the lock unlatching (too quickly!), and then the bright-red door, so cheery and welcoming, flung open too quickly. Cleo squeezed her eyes closed. No! No, no, no, no, no! This was not the intention of her regrets list. This was not how junior senators from New York made apologies! She should have stood firm and had Gaby craft a statement of sincere apology and weathered the storm. Then she remembered that they’d tried that (kind of) with Wolf Blitzer, and in the age of social media, one juicy scandal has longer tentacles than an apology, particularly for women. Women couldn’t fuck up the way that men could. They were held to a higher standard, as if making mistakes weren’t part of the human experience. Cleo understood that she couldn’t change society’s preconceptions with one Wolf Blitzer interview. She’d have to do that piece by piece, bit by bit, as senator, maybe as president, maybe just by raising her son to be a good human being.

Regardless, here she was on MaryAnne Newman’s doorstep, just like she had been so many times in her childhood, and she may as well get it over with.

She opened her eyes, raised her sunglasses to rest on the top of her head.

A girl about Lucas’s age stood in front of her.

It was as if Cleo were in eighth grade all over again, and she was shocked to feel the tingle of tears building. She blinked quickly; Cleo McDougal was not a spontaneous crier, and she didn’t even know why she was so emotional in the first place. The girl had MaryAnne’s blue eyes, her straight, long brown hair with fraying ends, a nose like a ski jump. Her cropped shirt aired her belly button; her denim shorts put her gangly legs on display.

“Oh my God,” the girl said.

“Oh my God,” Cleo replied.

“You’re, like, you’re the senator.”

“Oh.” Cleo chewed on her lip. “Yes. That’s me. But I also know your mom. Obviously.”

“I told her not to write it,” the girl said, so easily betraying her own mother. “I told her it was petty, but . . .” She shrugged. “I think your generation is different from mine.” She twisted her hair into a spiral with her hand.

“Oh,” Cleo said again. None of this was what she had been expecting. Cleo was good at confrontation—she’d honed the art after so many years in Congress. But this softer, kinder, younger version of their misspent youth had her off guard, uneasy in a close-to-an-emotional-breakdown sort of way. She could feel it in the sweat building in her armpits, in the staccato of her pulse. Then: “Well, is . . . is she here? Your mom.”

The girl shook her head. “They go to the club every Saturday night for dinner.”

Cleo turned in both defeat and victory toward Gaby. “She’s not home! Can we quit now?”

“It’s just, like, a five-minute walk,” the girl said. “I can take you. But, I mean, I don’t blame you if you don’t want to speak with her ever again. It was shady, for sure. Like, the opposite of feminist. The affair stuff? Like, I said to her, Mom, no one cares who screws who anymore.”

Cleo tried to laugh. “Well, I’m not sure how true that is, but thank you.” A snapshot of Nobells scampering out of her tiny apartment in a rush to get home to his family flew through her mind. She shook her head, as if that could release him from her memory. “Anyway, I guess since I showed up at your front door, I do need to speak with her, but—”

Gaby cut her off, no longer whispering, shouting from the front lawn, “We’re in! Just lead the way!”

Her name was Esme, which Cleo thought was exactly a name that MaryAnne would select—French. She was surprised, however, that Esme was nearly Lucas’s age. She didn’t peg MaryAnne as a young-mom type, but then, no one probably pegged Cleo as the young (single) mom type either. Truth told, Cleo hadn’t even been sure if she wanted children, but then her parents died, and when she saw the plus sign on the test the spring of her senior year at Northwestern, she thought it might be nice to go through life with someone. By the time Lucas was born, she knew she’d never have a moment of doubt.

Which wasn’t true. She had plenty of moments of doubt. Somewhere on that list of 233 screwups, at least a dozen of them were related to Lucas. Not Lucas. She loved him more than she ever anticipated. Just the whole thing: the struggle; the exhaustion; how like it or not, being a mother at twenty-three and in law school affected her choices; how differently she anticipated it would all go for her. Maybe MaryAnne felt similarly.

“Are you in eighth grade?” Lucas asked her, staring at the cement as they walked.

“Yep. You?”

“Yeah. But I guess I’m old enough to be in ninth.”

“No, that’s not true,” Cleo interjected, and Lucas shot her a look that could quite possibly wither her right there in the fading sunshine on the Broadmoor sidewalk. Cleo popped her eyes back at him. She didn’t know the rules of him talking to a girl because frankly, she’d never seen him interact with one. Was she not allowed to speak? Did she have to render herself invisible? She was only thirty-seven! She liked to think that she was at least hip enough to make small talk with her kid.

“Mom—” he said.

“I only meant that when we moved to DC, you started kindergarten as one of the oldest. I didn’t hold you back.”

“I didn’t say that you did.”

“Well, it sort of sounded like . . .”

At this, Gaby grabbed her elbow and pulled Cleo back a half pace to let Lucas and Esme find their footing on their own.

Cleo watched Esme stroll down the street, so lanky and at ease. Her gait was exactly like her mother’s—MaryAnne had always been good at track, one area where they didn’t compete with each other—and Cleo guessed that Esme had it in her to do a mile in less than seven minutes too. It was so strange, she thought, to show up and find a younger rendition of her old friend, as if time had stopped and she were looking at their old selves. Cleo found herself a little slayed at this, at the notion of their fourteen-year-old selves having the chance to do it again, to do it better. So maybe this was what regret felt like: sorry for the fact that they weren’t wiser to how they would blow it up.

“I haven’t seen him this talkative since. . .” Cleo watched Lucas banter. “I don’t know. Birth?”

“I glanced at his texts on the plane today,” Gaby replied. Of course she had, because Gaby was such a goddamn smooth operator. “I think he has a girlfriend back home too.”

“He what?” Cleo actually stopped midstride.

“I could be wrong, but . . . I’m usually not.”

“I’m sorry, you mean my fourteen-year-old who usually communicates by grunting and stuffing food into his mouth has . . . what?”

Gaby grinned. “See, look at that, we’ve only been in Seattle for two hours, and already I’m rocking your world.”

“I hate you.”

“Tell me something I don’t know,” Gaby said, and they double-stepped to catch up with the other two who were leading the way.

Esme waved to the security guard at the front gate of the club, and they wound through the walking path to the main building, which was also more or less just how Cleo remembered. Ornate fabrics, overstuffed window seats, bookshelves stacked with leather-bound collections that absolutely no one was going to read in between their tennis matches or golf rounds. Everything about the club was rich, and though Cleo was theoretically part of an elite class now, still, it knocked her off guard. Being elite in intellect or even elite with power wasn’t the same thing as being elite with wealth, because if it had been, Cleo wouldn’t have had to work so hard and fight so hard to land where she did. As a kid, Cleo always shoved her hands into her pockets, curled her shoulders, and kept her eyes down when they strolled through, as if the real members couldn’t see her if she couldn’t see them and that if she were invisible, no one could call her out (or throw her out) for being an impostor.

Esme checked the time on her phone.

“They’re probably getting drinks before dinner. Come on—I’ll show you.”