Lucas trailed after her like a lovesick puppy, and Gaby giggled a little at the sight.

They strode past the tennis courts, with towering lights just warming up at dusk, and the pool, where a few fortunate toddlers splashed in the shallow end with bored mothers looking on and a few seniors methodically swam laps. Cleo remembered this all so well, the way that MaryAnne would sign her in like they were sisters, the way that in middle school, they would sink into the pool until their fingers pruned, the way that they would linger in the locker room showers, using too much shampoo and conditioner because they smelled like honeysuckle and lemon, and both Cleo and MaryAnne thought such a scent might attract a few suitors. (It did not.) Through all of it, Cleo was grateful for MaryAnne but also always, always aware of that sign-in, that MaryAnne had the entry and Cleo did not. That MaryAnne’s parents could call their principal and demand a retake of the French test because her parents’ names were on a brick outside the school, and Cleo’s parents’ names were not.

But Cleo brought other things to their friendship; she was the alpha in nearly everything else, and MaryAnne seemed fine with it all; they each had their power; they each knew their lane. And then they’d gotten to high school, and the stakes became so infinitely higher, and somehow an unspoken pact arose between them: Do whatever you must at whatever cost. As Esme opened the door to the bar area, Cleo considered that maybe this had never been their pact; maybe it had simply been an agreement she’d made with herself. No regrets. Of which, obviously, she had many: 233.

Cleo’s pulse was throbbing at a near-medical-emergency rate by now.

“They’re usually in the back,” Esme was saying, though Cleo could barely hear her above not just the din of the TVs airing a Mariners game and the clinking of forks and the uncorking of wine bottles and the popping of beer caps but of her own internal voice shrieking, Get the fuck out of here! But she too followed Esme, much like Lucas, and then they were there, in the depths of the bar room, and Gaby had her phone out and aimed like a shotgun, and there was nothing to do to turn back time (to an hour ago, a decade ago, two decades ago, Cleo didn’t know) because MaryAnne, in a pastel dress and soft pink blush and blood-red lipstick, was right in front of her.

Cleo felt a rush of flop sweat streak down her back. Professional confrontations were her forte. Personal confrontations, she realized only at this moment, were not even in her repertoire. Panic was setting in, and though Cleo McDougal never, ever in her life ran from a fight, her instinct was to turn and flee. She glanced toward her old ex–best friend and for just a tiny flicker of a moment was punctured that this was what it had come to. Then she sewed that lament back up.

“Hi, Mom. Look who I found,” Esme said, and Cleo decided immediately that she loved this girl. She was a little bit cunning and also succinct and knew that she was slaying her mom just a bit in her guts.

MaryAnne’s eyes moved from her daughter to Cleo, who was doing her best to contain her adrenaline, and her jaw went slack. Just for a moment. Then it firmed up, as did her steely eyes and her rigid posture. (“I have a backbone,” MaryAnne once snapped at Cleo, after the mayoral internship debacle. She meant it metaphorically, but MaryAnne was also a debutante, so she meant it literally too. No one had better posture than MaryAnne Newman.)

It was only then that Cleo worked up the nerve to take in a wider view. She’d assumed that the “they” in Esme’s remarks had been MaryAnne and her husband, but now she saw that it was a table of eight, all faces she recognized, all faces from her yearbook and probably some of those Facebook comments too.

“Shit,” Cleo muttered under her breath. She turned and looked at Gaby, who was recording with the determined furrow of a documentary filmmaker. “Shit!”

Gaby paid her no mind, and Cleo spun forward.

“MaryAnne, um, hello.”

The back room had fallen so silent that Cleo could hear a bat crack from the Mariners game out front. Eight sets of eyes on Cleo—well, eleven if you counted Lucas and Esme and Gaby, but Lucas and Esme may have been staring at each other.

MaryAnne rested her hands in her lap and swallowed. It was so odd, Cleo thought, trying to remove the nostalgia and the crest of emotion that had swept through her just moments earlier, to see her after so many years. Her mannerisms were still the same, her face, though older of course, still a mirror of who she had been at seventeen. Twenty years had passed, and yet Cleo could nearly read her mind, just like before when they were inseparable.

“Cleo,” MaryAnne said finally. “This is a surprise.”

“I think it’s Senator McDougal,” Esme interjected, and Cleo wondered if she couldn’t adopt this child before she left town.

“Cleo’s fine. Of course.” But she smiled at Esme as she said this, an acknowledgment of their shared feminism, of the power that came with a title that so few women had yet to attain.

“Hey, Cleo!” From behind MaryAnne, Oliver Patel, her sole defender on that ruinous Facebook post, offered a wave. “It’s so cool to see you here!”

“Hey, Oliver,” she said back, and his eyebrows rose a little bit like he was surprised that she remembered him. But he had always been kind and also extremely handsome—dark hair, dark eyes as big and as entrancing as a full moon, just the right grade of stubble—so of course she remembered him. He was unattainable, a baseball player, someone Cleo passed in the halls and thought that if she were a different type of person—softer, prettier, the girl who laughed at jokes she didn’t get when he told them on the quad during a free period, the type of girl who actually spent her time on the quad during a free period—maybe he’d kiss her one night at a party after drinking a beer. Yes, Cleo remembered Oliver Patel. Cleo had been hard-core in high school but she hadn’t been impenetrable.

To his right sat Maureen Allen, who had less nice things to say about her, and Susan Harris, then Beth Shin, who, well, ditto. (Cleo didn’t remember the names of the three others at the table, though she knew she should have.) They’d all been on the debate team together, but Maureen and Susan dropped out their junior year to . . . Cleo couldn’t quite remember why—but she did remember thinking at the time that she was glad they had. Beth had been a decent debater, but those two were barely adequate, and Cleo thought they held the team back. But now, so many years later, well, she hadn’t really thought about how they might all still be friends—not just Facebook friends but real-life friends—how their world from back then wasn’t so different from their world now. Surely, if MaryAnne had wanted to, she could have made choices that expanded her scope beyond what it had always been. She couldn’t hold Cleo accountable for her sitting in the same country club with the same people discussing, likely, the same gossip that she had at fifteen. (Cleo didn’t want to judge—anyone should do whatever made them happy—but then MaryAnne dragged her into this whole thing to begin with, so perhaps Cleo had the right to do and think whatever she damn wanted.)

Maureen Allen and Susan Harris and Beth Shin, unlike Oliver, said nothing and just glared.

Then Cleo remembered, as Esme had been trying to remind her, that she was a goddamn United States senator, and MaryAnne Newman shouldn’t intimidate her, SeattleToday! op-ed or not, lurid (inaccurate) rumors or not, Facebook slander or not. She too righted her posture, and she was sure from the look in MaryAnne’s eyes that she remembered Cleo’s body language as well.

“I’m here because obviously I saw your op-ed.”

MaryAnne’s cheeks flushed, which surprised Cleo, because you’d have thought that MaryAnne wanted the fight, the confrontation, what with the public takedown. But maybe she had just wanted to air a bunch of dirty laundry without thinking through the consequences. God, wasn’t that at least what half of the internet was these days? Screaming into the void about someone or something or an airline or a coffee shop or a slow pedestrian or a lousy driver and getting it off your chest? Never once did you think any of those people was going to respond.

“Also, I saw your Facebook post, and then, of course, I saw all of your comments.”

Oliver Patel grinned, and Maureen and Susan and Beth pulled back from their glares and looked as if they might turn figuratively green. Consequences. Regret. They’re tied together.