“Your parents,” Wolf interjected, as if Cleo had forgotten.

“Yes, well, my parents were killed the summer before in a helicopter accident, and I don’t think that any seventeen-year-old can be expected to handle that with the grace that’s required. Not completely anyway.”

Cleo did not want to play the “dead parents card” any more than she wanted to play the “Lucas card.” But it was true: her parents had been killed when, as a surprise anniversary present, her dad took her mom up on a new Boeing chopper he was working on, and Cleo then had to move in with her grandmother. And maybe she still would have cut MaryAnne off at the knees to be the editor of the paper—she was the golden child of the household, and she knew, both then and now, that her parents had hung the moon on her achievements—but Cleo couldn’t say now. Her dad had taught her to reach for what she wanted, to grab hold and dig her nails in deep, so she didn’t think he would mind her mentioning her parents now. With Wolf. On national TV. With the presidential bid calling. Her mother, though . . . her mother may have minded.

“So you do have regrets?” Wolf asked.

“Don’t all people have regrets?” She hoped her face didn’t twitch when she said this, betraying her. She’d have to rewatch the tape later to be sure.

Wolf nodded at this and let her off the hook. Politicians being human was always a good thing to go to commercial with.

Did Cleo have regrets? Of course she did. But this did not please Gaby.

“I love you, Clee,” she said once the CNN crew had left their offices and in between bites of her midday omelet (protein). She passed Cleo a wipe to remove the TV makeup. “But you admitted that you’ve made mistakes. Men can do that. Women, not so much.”

Gaby reminded Cleo of her mother when she said this, which was maybe part of the reason they were such good friends. Cleo had discipline, to be sure. But Gaby had acumen beyond the rigidity and focus needed to become a congresswoman at twenty-five and a senator at thirty-one. Gaby had been the one to nurse the slow but steady drumbeat of support for a presidential run, molding Cleo’s messages and tone, which initially were more strident than necessary and probably more off-putting than Cleo realized. MaryAnne wasn’t the only one from Seattle who harbored a grudge. And probably Northwestern. And Columbia Law. Cleo was likable enough to get elected but not so likable that she ever would have won a popularity contest of her peers. She didn’t care all that much, but Gaby did, which was why Gaby had vision, just like Mona, Cleo’s mom, who’d had vision in a different way—she’d been part of the company at the Pacific Northwest Ballet until she first got pregnant, and then she picked up painting, as if that had been a natural course for her all along. She became fairly well-known for her work within the Seattle art scene—not because she was Georgia O’Keeffe or Frida Kahlo (the list of famous female artists was sadly significantly shorter than their male peers) but because she had a unique ability to capture a specific, piercing emotion in each of her works. As if she could see through not just her subjects but her audience too. Gaby was like this: a seer, and it made her extremely excellent at her job and dangerous too.

“I didn’t mean to sound weak,” Cleo said. Her stomach growled as Gaby tore into her omelet. “And I don’t think I did. Isn’t part of the human experience admitting your mistakes?”

“Human but not female.”

“Disagree.” Cleo palmed her stomach, as if this would quell her hunger. “Part of being a good lawmaker is the ability to adapt.” Cleo thought of her dad, how he’d tell her to jab left if she couldn’t jab right. To dance, to move, to win. And her mom would laugh and laugh when she and her dad did this little jig in their kitchen—his hands up and Cleo punching them, as if her dad were an amateur boxer and not a nerdy Boeing engineer, and as if Cleo were a prizefighter, not a middle schooler who barely made the growth charts. And how happy it made Cleo to see her mom laugh and to please both of them. That laughter and approval and Cleo winning were all knotted together, especially after Georgie, her older sister, had been such a disappointment.

Gaby’s phone buzzed before they could get into it further, which Cleo found to be a bit of a relief. She and Gaby so rarely disagreed, and she didn’t want to butt heads with her closest advisor, not over MaryAnne Newman.

Gaby’s face grew still as her eyes raced over her screen.

“Hmm,” she said, and it was not a hmm of ponderance. More a hmm of displeasure.

Cleo’s stomach rumbled again, and she pressed her intercom, asking her executive assistant to bring her something, anything that they had on hand in the office. Someone had grabbed a tray of muffins a day or so ago, left over from a meeting. That could do.

“Hmm,” Gaby muttered again, and this time Cleo could not wait.

“What?”

Arianna, in a blazing fuchsia sweater and wide-legged black pants that reminded Cleo of the shape of the Liberty Bell, entered with the picked-over plate of muffins and a bag of Bugles. This was surely not the job she’d had in mind when she graduated from Columbia Law last May, but everyone needed to start somewhere. (Cleo often worked on legislation with Arianna’s father, an environmental lawyer, and when he called her to say his daughter was graduating from Cleo’s alma mater and could she find room on her staff, Cleo happily did.)

“This was all I could find. But I can run out?” All of Arianna’s sentences ended with a question mark, which Cleo made a mental note to dissuade her from. Women in politics didn’t have the luxury of ending their sentences on an upswing, as if they were asking permission, as if they couldn’t find the answers themselves, as if they were waiting for someone to guide them. Actually, Cleo thought, women everywhere couldn’t afford this.

“Don’t worry,” Cleo said to Arianna, reaching for a nonspecific flavor that she thought might be carrot but proved to be banana nut. “This is great.”

“I’m sorry,” Arianna said. She tugged at the hem of her sweater.

“Don’t apologize,” Cleo replied. “Don’t apologize for anything if you’re not responsible for the problem.”

“OK. I’ll try.”

“It takes a while,” Cleo added. “Eventually you’ll refuse to apologize even when you are responsible.” Cleo thought again of her parents in the kitchen, with her report cards hung on the refrigerator and a giant poster board from the science fair—an exploration of the hierarchy of a beehive—which had won first prize that month. Of how her dad had kept telling her to hit his palms harder and harder, then harder still, and how he was sweating by then, and Cleo was a little worried about him to be honest, but she put some muscle behind it, and then the phone rang, and her dad startled, and Cleo inadvertently hit him square in the jaw. He refused to allow her to apologize. She was just doing what he asked, he said. Cleo felt guilty for the evening but then resolved that he was right. He told her to assert her strength, and she did. She shouldn’t be sorry. He was the one who had jolted. (But she did check on him and bring him another ice pack. She loved her dad something fierce.)

“Also, Arianna, can you check my passport and ensure that everything is up-to-date? I am heading out on the delegation trip to the Middle East in a few weeks.” Technically all her papers were in order, but Cleo liked to be sure before each trip anyway. There was something methodical about her process that she found reassuring.

Arianna squeaked that she would and shut the door behind her, the hems of her pants swaying as she went.

“So,” Gaby said. “This story isn’t going away.”

“But I did Wolf Blitzer!” Cleo swallowed a bite of the muffin top and wondered if her assessment of banana nut was wrong. What else could it be? It wasn’t carrot; it wasn’t banana nut. “What kind of muffin is this?” She broke off a piece and offered it to Gaby.

“Technically I’m off gluten, but this is what you pay me for, so . . .” She placed it on her tongue, assessed. “It’s vanilla macadamia.”

Cleo was impressed not just with her palate but also with her certainty. Indeed, it was vanilla macadamia, which she’d never have sussed out on her own.

“It looks like MaryAnne has some clout up in Seattle. Turning this into a bit of a stink.” Gaby paused, still scrolling. “She was interviewed on their own local news today . . . and . . .” Scrolling. “She shared the ridiculous op-ed on Facebook, which I guess was seen by some of your old classmates.” She tapped her phone. “Hmm. OK, well, some of your classmates are defending you but . . . hmm, OK, wow, well, some of them are not.”

“Tell me something I don’t already know.”

Gaby sighed. Rested her phone in her lap next to her takeout container with the half-eaten omelet.

“So, Cleo, I love you. You know that. I will work with you forever and tirelessly, and I believe that you can and should be president. Even before forty.”