At the hotel, Gaby and Cleo lounged on the king mattress in Gaby’s room. Well, Gaby lounged, leaning up against the headboard, and Cleo got up and paced. They’d given Lucas his space; he was already half-mortified that he had to share a room with his mother, so Cleo suggested he treat himself to room service, and she’d be back in a bit. She didn’t know what he expected—they’d always been a unit, just the two of them, and simply because puberty held him in its grasp didn’t mean that she was booking him a separate hotel room. She’d avert her eyes; she’d never enter the bathroom while he was in there. She was doing her very best.

Gaby had ordered two burgers and two fries for them respectively, but Cleo didn’t have much of an appetite. She nibbled on a disproportionately long fry (she’d always been drawn to outliers) and considered what came next. She didn’t think that MaryAnne was going to stop, and in fact, Cleo was scared to check her Facebook page now. Surely her ex–best friend had teed off about their evening, saying God knows what to God knows who. Gaby stared at her phone while it buzzed and buzzed and buzzed, biting her burger thoughtfully, as if it held the key to their mess.

“Ooh!” Gaby said, a grin appearing on her face, even while she chewed. “Ooooh.”

“Good news?” Cleo stopped midstride and hoped for a bit of a miracle. “Did she forgive me?”

“Hmm, no.” Gaby looked up from her screen. “But that Oliver guy just texted me asking if I wanted to get a drink.” She righted herself off the bed and reached for her suitcase. “And you know what, Oliver Patel? I do.”

“Wait, he texted you?” Cleo groaned. She wasn’t even sure when they had time to exchange numbers.

“You wanted him for yourself?” Gaby was in her bra now, throwing on a bright-yellow silk shirt that complemented her skin tone perfectly and which, Cleo suspected, Oliver would never be able to resist.

“Well, I didn’t not want him. He was cute in high school—I didn’t really know him well, but my Lord, look at him now.”

“I know.” Gaby raised and lowered her eyebrows, then did it three more times. “I know.”

Cleo flopped on the bed, muttered into the pillow, “I’m happy for you.”

“It’s just drinks,” Gaby said, but then she laughed, rich and decadent, and they both knew that it wasn’t.

“It’s fine,” Cleo said, face still in the pillow. “I’ll go hang out with my teen son who has more romantic interests than I do.”

“Clee.” Gaby turned to her, serious now. “If you want . . . I can set up a profile on Tinder.” She laughed again, gleeful, and Cleo threw the pillow at her head.

“Don’t wait up.” She grabbed her purse from the arm of the desk chair and dropped her room key into her back pocket. “Oh, also,” she added, like it was an afterthought, “I just uploaded the video to YouTube. So buckle up!”

“You what?” Cleo jumped to her feet at a pace that would very much impress her boxing instructor. “It was a fucking disaster; why would . . . Seriously, Gaby, this has to stop!”

“No, it wasn’t. I reread all of your internals, and the electorate wants to see growth. They don’t expect perfection.”

Cleo sat back down on the bed.

“Hey, chin up, Senator McDougal. We’re just getting started.”

“Honestly.” Cleo fell backward and stared at the ceiling. “That’s what worries me.”

Cleo had the YouTube app on her phone but had never used it. Why would she? Sometimes Lucas watched . . . she thought they were called “vloggers”? And he for sure caught up with some soccer stars, watching their foot skills, cheering their goals, salivating for whichever products they hocked.

She knew she could head back to their room and ask him to find the video and read the comments, but really, what good was going to come from that? It was disorienting being back here in her hometown, seeing her old friends. Well, maybe not friends. Peers. But at some point, she and MaryAnne had truly loved each other like sisters, and there was no way around that fact, even in the wreckage of what came next.

She thought she’d give Lucas a bit more breathing room, and besides, she could use some air herself. She shot Lucas a quick text that she was taking a walk (he wouldn’t care, but she was still a responsible parent), then slid on her flats and strode through the Sheraton lobby and out into the Seattle night. The city had changed so much since she’d grown up here—it was a vibrant boom of a town now, expansive and glittering, but still, so much of it felt pregnant with memories—of shopping trips to Nordstrom with MaryAnne’s mom’s credit card, where they bought electric-blue eyeliner at Clinique or frosty glossy lip shellac at Veronica Kaye, of a field trip to the aquarium in middle school where Cleo had stood so long in front of the shark exhibit that the bus back to school nearly left her, of the scent of Benihana lingering on their clothes after MaryAnne’s birthday every year. Cleo could feel the smudge of the kohl eyeliner, smell the scent of the aquarium, taste the fried rice and egg.

She turned right toward the waterfront. She wished that she’d brought her yellow pad of paper with her 233 regrets on the trip because she’d add today to it: 234. She hadn’t thought much about how she sabotaged MaryAnne in a long time, probably since . . . college? She didn’t know. She’d thought of MaryAnne, sure, from time to time, but not about her role in how, maybe, she had changed MaryAnne’s life as much as she changed her own. Though she didn’t think it was quite that easy. Cleo had worked her goddamn ass off to be the youngest congresswoman and then the youngest senator, and honestly, mayoral internship or not, school newspaper editor or not, it was entirely possible she’d have landed in the exact same position. But could she be certain?

She crossed the street from Second Avenue to First, the incline dropping perilously as if beckoning pedestrians to Pike Place Market. No, she told herself. I can’t be certain. And maybe that made her shitty or maybe that made her ingenious. She didn’t know. She knew only what she did and where it led her, and also that she had been sixteen or seventeen, and sixteen-year-olds and seventeen-year-olds made mistakes. She didn’t know what Oliver Patel was doing with his life now (other than being gorgeous), but she hoped that he wasn’t paying the price for that time his senior year when he went streaking across the baseball field when he got accepted to Berkeley. (He probably wasn’t. Men are forgiven much more easily and much quicker than women, Cleo knew. Hell, everyone knew.) Cleo had not been part of that streaking crowd. In fact, now that she thought of it, MaryAnne hadn’t really been either. Or maybe MaryAnne had been after she and Cleo broke apart, and MaryAnne had forged on without her.

Cleo reached the Waterfront Park right on Elliott Bay, leaned against the concrete ledge, gazed into the black horizon, which shone with lights from homes across the way. Her mom, who never seemed to begrudge that she hung up her pointe shoes when her children arrived, used to come here and paint at sunrise. By middle school, Cleo was always awake—even set her alarm for six a.m. because she’d read that successful people were early risers, so it seemed like a good habit to get into—and sometimes her mom would make her tag along. “Make” because Cleo had never been creative or interested in her mother’s art beyond a simple appreciation for her talent and a bit of reverence for the fact that she had once been a star dancer and had somehow also now honed that spark into a different form of talent. Cleo didn’t much see the point of creative fields. She never said as much to her mom, though her mom was often nudging her to tap into something, even when it was obvious that Cleo’s skill set lay elsewhere.

“It doesn’t have to be painting,” her mom would say, and they knew damn well that it wasn’t going to be dance. At two, Cleo had evidently run screaming from her first ballet class, and her mother, having endured blisters and broken toenails and pulled hamstrings and fractured ribs, all by eighteen, didn’t push it again. Instead, as Cleo grew older, she said: “Anything, anything, sweetheart! Music, art, or pick up a camera! All of this opens you up to new possibilities.” But Cleo had already learned that her parents’ praise was so intertwined with her success, and even though her mother pushed her to simply dabble, dabbling didn’t earn approving murmurs and an extra twenty dollars for spending money and sometimes, a special night out where they all dressed up in fancy clothes and toasted her with wine (her parents) and Shirley Temples (her).

Now, of course, because she was a member of Congress who needed to appear well rounded, she tolerated music and art and theater, and God knows she read too much (usually nonfiction, most often biographies). She supported arts funding and all that, but she was never going to wander through the Guggenheim because she had a free afternoon or attend the ballet because the urge struck her. She just wasn’t.