A boat blared its horn in the distance, and something came to her, a surprise. That years ago—maybe ten, maybe five, she’d have to check when she was back in DC—Cleo had indeed added something to her list: I never learned to paint. Or sing. Or dance. Or anything. Maybe that could have been a nice thing.

Cleo stared up at the sky, thought of her mother, how strange it was that she had been gone for twenty years and only now Cleo was recognizing pieces of her in herself. She didn’t think she’d want Gaby filming her in an art class, but it couldn’t have been more embarrassing than what went down at the country club. Her gut twinged, and for the first time in a long time, she acutely missed her mother. When you lose your parents young, there is simply a blight on your psyche that becomes part of your being. Really, it had become background noise to Cleo: she knew the loss was there, but if she paid too much attention to it, it would override everything.

She turned to go, the memories both too poignant and just poignant enough. She’d cleared her head, felt a little more at peace with the mess of the day. Cleo didn’t believe in hokey things but maybe it was her mom looking out for her, like she would have back in middle school or high school. When Cleo would wind herself up over a spelling bee or, later, an algebra test, and her mom would stand behind her and rub her shoulders and pour her a glass of orange juice, and it didn’t make everything better, but it helped. (Incidentally, she was the spelling bee champion in fifth through seventh grades.) Also, she knew her success was a glue among the three of them, what with Georgie being such a mess, such—though her parents would never have said this aloud—a disappointment. Georgie required so much of her parents’ energy, Cleo just wanted to make it easier for them. And she liked how winning felt too.

Now, Cleo angled herself up the hill back to the Sheraton and breathed deeply, wondering if her mom could hear her breath, though she knew she couldn’t. But it was nice to pretend that she could. For a moment, Cleo wondered if maybe something was shifting in her, quaking inside.

Or maybe that was her phone notifications. By the time she arrived back at the hotel, with Gaby nowhere to be found, the YouTube video of her confrontation with MaryAnne had 100,000 views, and upon hearing her fumbling with her key card, Lucas swung open the door with a wide-eyed, “Holy shit, Mom, you’ve gone viral.”

SIX

Cleo had taken an Ambien and slept surprisingly well, though not long. She could get by on nearly no sleep—a by-product of training herself for late nights at work, fine-tuning legislation or reviewing details with her staff. Gaby was still unreachable by midnight (three a.m. Washington, DC, time), so Cleo popped the pill and away she went. Discipline was never one of her problems, so staying off YouTube and Twitter, where the video had of course also taken flight, wasn’t difficult. Actually, getting Lucas to put his own phone away was more of the battle, but then it always was.

Their room was dark, the sun barely up itself, when she woke. For a very brief second, she debated rising and going to the hotel gym, giving her that precious hour away from her screen. But then it lit up with a new text, and Cleo couldn’t help herself. Truth told, discipline was not her strongest suit until she’d at least had a coffee.

She couldn’t bear to read all the notifications, so instead, she focused on the most recent.

Georgie.

Cleo couldn’t remember when they’d last spoken. She closed her eyes again, tried to trace back. In the adjacent double bed, Lucas snored just loudly enough for Cleo to hear but not loudly enough to have woken her, and she remembered those early foggy baby days, when he’d get congested and snore and cry and snore and wail, and she’d wonder how on earth either of them would ever make it out of his infancy alive. Georgie had shed all her disaster years by then and had two toddlers at the time (twins), and sometimes Cleo would tentatively reach out for advice. But childhood and sibling impressions are tough to break, and Cleo never quite trusted Georgie’s advice and also resented that she had to ask for help in the first place. That part wasn’t Georgie’s fault—she’d forward her articles on sleep training and why Cleo shouldn’t beat herself up when breastfeeding didn’t take—but it was hard to bridge the gap between them. Not just the age gap, not just the distance gap, but that elusive sense that though you were blood, sisters even, you really were more or less strangers. Through Cleo’s formative years, Georgie had been a disruption around the house, a stressor for her parents, a blight on their family dynamic. Those weren’t things that you glided over just because your parents were gone and you really only had each other. Maybe in the movies; maybe in fiction. But the truth was that genetics took you only so far, and Cleo didn’t know Georgie any better than she knew anyone else. It’s just how it was, with them virtually strangers when they shared the same house and then with Georgie having moved out by the time Cleo was eight. Also, as complicated as their relationship was from Cleo’s perspective—that she couldn’t help but see her sister as a permanent fuckup, even though Georgie was a heralded success in adulthood—Cleo also knew that Georgie held her own view: that she had been an only child for ten years before the baby came along and upended things. And as Cleo aspired to be the perfect child, Georgie was rebelling against it. Magnetic particles who repelled one another rather than grew closer.

Still, in adulthood, Georgie tried. She really did.

Georgie: R U in Seattle?? Saw the video. I shld come help.

After all the years of teenage and young adult turmoil, after dropping out of the UW and relocating to LA and enrolling in UCLA (and clearing her five-year probation from her weed arrest), Georgie had made a name for herself as a guru life coach therapist to the stars. She sold crystals and essential oils and, last Cleo had heard, was in talks to launch a tunic clothing line. (Georgie was always in tunics.) From time to time, she’d text Cleo with advice on how to de-stress with deep breathing or why she couldn’t and shouldn’t burn the figurative wick at both ends. Cleo always found it at least a little amusing that her sister was famous for doling out wisdom, but maybe Georgie had learned a thing or two on her rockier path to adulthood, and for that, Georgie had earned Cleo’s respect, even if the younger sister would never, ever believe in the healing power of crystals.

Cleo typed a reply.

Cleo: It’s ok. Leaving tomorrow. Gaby is on top of it.

Georgie wrote back immediately. She’d be awake this early on a Sunday because her twins, like Lucas, played club soccer—were being recruited for college scholarships—and Cleo was certain Georgie had them up juicing or stretching with her personal trainer or in their private home gym. (Cleo wasn’t being critical. No one got anywhere in this world without greasing their elbows and leaning in to the work.)

Georgie: Not ok. It’s a mess online. Have u not seen? Are u taking care of urself?

Actually, Cleo hadn’t seen. Because she really didn’t want to look. But she also really didn’t want to admit that to Georgie, who would take it for weakness, because, well, it was.

Cleo: Gotta run, Lucas wants to hit the gym. Will circle back. Promise.

Cleo watched as the ominous three dots appeared on her screen, then disappeared.

They both likely knew that Cleo would not circle back, nor did she really promise. Were unkept promises better or worse between sisters? Cleo didn’t know. She knew only that her family now was Lucas and, to a certain extent, Gaby. And it probably wasn’t what she always wanted for herself, but she was adult enough to know that almost no one got exactly what she wanted for herself. You got what you got, and you could work hard, really, really hard, and hopefully shift the tides or change your circumstances, but that usually didn’t reframe your foundation. If it did, you were one of the lucky ones—the exception, not the rule.

Plenty of people had it far worse than she did.

Unlike Georgie, Gaby was pleased with the overnight results from the YouTube upload.

“Look.” She thrust her phone in Cleo’s face while they were in the back seat of an Uber, on the way to Cleo’s old neighborhood.

Cleo didn’t know what she was looking at and frowned.

“The tide has shifted. At least half of these comments—” Gaby paused and scrolled lower. “At least sixty percent of these comments think MaryAnne was in the wrong.”

“Yeah,” Lucas said. “But I’m looking at her Facebook page, and no offense, Mom, but the people who actually know you do not seem on board.” He paused. “Wow, like, I actually had to go on Facebook. Don’t tell anyone.”

“Fuck those people you know,” Gaby said. Then: “Sorry, Lucas. Pretend you didn’t hear that.”

“I’m fourteen, Gaby; we all say ‘fuck.’”

Cleo groaned. “Please, God, is it too much to ask for you not to swear . . . like that . . . in front of me?”

They both swiveled their necks toward her, unsure to whom she was speaking.

“You, Lucas, you. Gaby is my chief of staff, so it’s OK if she says . . . ‘the f word’ to me.”