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 sliding scale on most things), always with the eye that one day her record, her history might come to light.

This didn’t mean she didn’t have regrets. She did. MaryAnne Newman knew that too. She was just wrong about this one.

Cleo reached for Lucas’s phone and tried not to think of Nobells. She hoped she didn’t look as shell-shocked as she felt, with the memories of the affair now reawakened. Fuck you, MaryAnne Newman.

“MaryAnne was my best friend until my senior year in high school,” she said, and her voice did not shake even though for most people, in light of such a public takedown, it would. But she had years of debate team triumphs and of speaking on the Senate floor (she had been elected at thirty-one, among the youngest senators in history) behind her. Her voice would not quake, even in her kitchen with her son handing her such a grenade. “And she shouldn’t have written such lies, much less from an anonymous ‘reliable source.’ And they should have fact-checked it, and I have no idea why they didn’t.”

She did know actually—because in today’s environment, lurid half-truths garnered eyeballs, and no one really cared to differentiate between fact and fiction when they hit Retweet. Cleo made a mental note to have Gaby call the editors at this “paper” and go absolutely batshit on them. “But you know how it is these days, especially when you’re a public figure. People say anything about you, and half the world takes it as truth.” She looked Lucas right in the eye. “But, buddy, we know our truth. And this isn’t it.”

Lucas shoved the Eggo in his mouth, held it in his teeth. Cleo wished that he took better care of himself, but any time she suggested it, it morphed into a fight. He was so handsome, with dark eyes and near-black hair, neither of which he got from Cleo, who burned at the first sign of sun and whose hair wasn’t quite blond but wasn’t quite brown either. She was tiny, which caused everyone—mostly men—to underestimate her, while Lucas was shooting up like a wild plant that wouldn’t stop sprouting. Cleo knew he got all that from his dad. Still, Lucas always looked a little bit unkempt, a little . . . dirty. Maybe that’s what fourteen-year-olds liked these days. She wasn’t too old to know . . . but really she was.

Lucas brushed back his bangs, which hung about half an inch too low for good vision; bit down on the waffle; chewed; swallowed; gave it some thought. “She really seems to dislike you. For a former best friend.”

Maybe this should have bothered Cleo, but she was long past seeking the approval of anyone other than her constituents. And Gaby. And Lucas.

“A lot of people dislike me. That’s part of the deal of holding office. It’s only going to get worse if I run for president.”

“If?” Lucas said. This had been an ever-present discussion between the two of them as of late. Cleo wouldn’t do anything without Lucas’s green light, but she very much wanted him to give her the green light. As a senator, Cleo’s life was mostly undisturbed outside the Capitol. All that would change in the White House. Lucas seemed to think it would be “all right, I guess” if he were the First Son, which Cleo took to be a near go-ahead, and from there she had dropped it.

“When. Well, if. Probably when, though,” Cleo said. “When I run.”

Cleo grabbed the phone, reread the story, which was less like an op-ed and more like a thinly veiled personal vendetta. Talk of her presidential run had grown louder lately: The Today Show had done a walk and talk with her to introduce her to a national audience; she’d done Meet the Press last month and fared well. She needed some big endorsements and she needed some bigger checks, but Gaby thought they had momentum, and Cleo had always been one to use momentum in her favor.

“So then, what’d you do to her?” Lucas asked. “Besides, I guess, cheating on the debate team and whatever?”

This was a longer conversation than they’d had over breakfast for at least two years, since puberty had kicked in, and though the subject was dire, Cleo was also delighted. Parents of teenagers took what they could get.

“I didn’t do that stuff either,” Cleo said. “It wasn’t like that—she and I did the same activities. I was just better at them.” This was an unkind assessment, but then again, MaryAnne had thrown these punches first. Cleo set down his phone and headed to her office to grab her own. There would be texts; there would be emails. Gaby would already be working with her team on crafting a media response. “Don’t worry about this, bud. It’s nothing.”

“That’s what people say when they’ve done something that they shouldn’t have,” he called after her.

“Have you brushed your teeth?” she called back. “We’re leaving in ten.”

“Yes,” he said. “Stop asking me that. I’m not eight.”

Cleo suspected he was lying about his teeth, but he was right: he wasn’t eight anymore; he had to learn about consequences. This was part of her parenting strategy: consequences. Unprotected sex led to unplanned pregnancies; abandoned best friends led to op-eds twenty years later. Choices are made, regrets are managed, consequences arise.

She’d learned all about them too.

TWO

Gaby was as mad as Cleo expected. Maybe mad wasn’t the correct description. Gabrielle, like Cleo, practically levitated when faced with an obstacle, particularly one that made her, well, furious, so this was Gaby at her utmost. By the time Cleo got to her office—after an emergency speakerphone call while dropping Lucas at school (he wore noise-canceling headphones because that’s just what he did in the car anyway)—Gaby, in heels that would cramp Cleo’s arches in a second flat, and in a slim navy blazer and even slimmer navy pants, had already written a response to be released to reporters, booked Cleo on CNN, and lined up a nine thirty a.m. conference call with lucrative campaign donors. Her staff of thirty-five was buzzing about like a well-oiled machine, even when faced with calamity, and Gaby barked orders, each staffer scurrying to nail down her own task. (Of her DC staff, only four were men. Cleo’s choice.) This efficiency, this competence, was why Cleo had hired Gabrielle for her very first run for office, when she was only a recent law school graduate and the mother of a toddler and brazen in the way that you have to be at twenty-four (elected at twenty-five to meet the constitutional minimum) to presume that you could beat a seven-time incumbent who had previously sleepwalked into reelection. (Incidentally, Martin Bridgewater was indicted on charges of insider trading the next year, so Cleo felt that she had done him a favor beating him so he didn’t have to step down to public scorn and scrutiny.)

“This will just be a blip,” Gaby said, staring at her phone, reading and talking and strategizing all at once. She looked up, locked eyes with Cleo, who was settling in behind her highly organized, extremely neat desk, unwinding her scarf that warded off the late-spring chill, sinking into her chair that needed some WD-40 again to stop the squeaking. “I’ll squelch this like . . .” She snapped her fingers. “Like that.”

“I know,” Cleo said. “This doesn’t worry me.” A beat. “All that much.”

She reached over and straightened a pile of color-coded folders, then brushed some dust off the silver-plated picture frame with a shot of Lucas when he was a toddler and dressed as a chocolate-chip cookie for Halloween.

“We can have the bitch killed,” Gaby said, laughing just a little. She knew, as a black woman, that she had to manage her anger, at least outwardly, though not so much in front of Cleo, who had known her since their second year at Columbia Law. If she said this aloud outside the office, the headlines would go on for days, likely ruining her career and possibly ruining any hope of Cleo’s run for president.

“That might be extreme: death,” Cleo replied. “She’s just nursing a grudge from high school, though the paternity stuff is wildly out-of-bounds. Obviously.” She tapped her mouse, zapping the screen saver of the suffragettes and waking her computer. “Still, I suppose I could have been kinder back then.”

“We all could have been kinder in high school.”

“Weren’t you elected, like, homecoming queen?”

“Well, sure.” Gaby reached for a protein bar from her bag. She was training for a marathon and had to eat every two hours. “But I didn’t get there by being nice. Homecoming queens are elected by playing dirty.”

“I wouldn’t know. I was not homecoming queen.”

“I don’t list it on my résumé,” Gaby said. “Though it was pretty great training for now. Is Lucas OK?”

“Fine, actually. He knows it isn’t true.” Cleo sighed. She had real work to do and just wanted this to evaporate. “I can reach out to MaryAnne. I think she still lives in Seattle. I can apologize.”