“What’s the ‘but’ coming?”

“But we’ve never really had the conversation about your past.”

“I don’t have a past,” Cleo said. Her muffin was becoming much less appealing.

“Everyone has a past, Clee.”

“Well, obviously.”

“What I mean is, you didn’t have liabilities in your New York race because no one cared all that much. New York wanted you, and they loved you, and it wasn’t even close. But this time it will be different.”

Cleo nodded. This wasn’t her first rodeo. In fact, it would technically be her sixth. Three congressional races, two senatorial.

“I’m not a dummy,” she said. “I know what I’m in for.”

“Then I need to know what I’m in for,” Gabrielle said. “I can’t protect you if I don’t know. Why would MaryAnne mention some married professor? I get that the timing is off with Lucas, but that doesn’t seem pulled from thin air.”

Cleo laughed but not her normal laugh, and they both knew it. It was her nervous laugh that she’d use whenever she needed to give herself a moment to strategize. It wasn’t actually all that often that she needed it. She was almost always prepared (a cable commentator once said too prepared) and rarely caught off guard, and besides, she had other ways to distract and deflect. All politicians did. Point fingers elsewhere, blame the other party, cite oppo research, take a fact and spin it so dizzily that no one even really knows what you’re talking about by the end and thus drops it. But none of this would work on Gabrielle. She was too smart, she was too close, and also, she was one of Cleo’s few dear, true, trusted friends. Probably her only one, actually. Cleo did not have a wide network of girlfriends, for reasons MaryAnne’s only partially accurate op-ed made clear.

Cleo exhaled, long, slow, measured. “I mean, listen, I have moments of regret.”

“Who doesn’t?”

“Right, so? So what? Then there’s nothing.”

Gaby’s phone buzzed, then buzzed again, but she didn’t even peek. “So if I peel back this onion with MaryAnne and the rest of this, there’ll be nothing there? I personally don’t care whom you’ve slept with. The electorate . . . may.”

“MaryAnne is, like, the president of her country club,” Cleo said, as if this had anything to do with anything.

“And those women are exactly who you need,” Gaby said, not incorrectly. “Thus . . . the affair?” She squinted, capturing a thought. “But I knew you in law school, and I swear, you were never getting laid.”

Cleo raised her eyebrows as if to say: Exactly. She hoped Gaby would let it go at that.

“Fine, whatever, but even you mentioning ‘regrets’ raises the hairs on my neck.” Gaby leveled her gaze, and Cleo knew she was giving her one chance to tell her version of the truth before this went any further: into a real campaign launch, into a confrontation with MaryAnne, into a war with the press. Gaby was not the type of woman who liked to be caught unaware in the middle of a fistfight.

“Fine. Listen. My dad. He and I started something when I was younger. My mom thought it was . . .” Cleo hesitated, remembering. “Well, my mom thought it was ‘a tornado of negative energy,’ that’s what she would always say. ‘Why are you getting caught up in that negative energy? Go focus on just being a superstar!’” Cleo smiled at this because her parents had been diametrical opposites who also fit together perfectly. They’d had her late—Cleo always assumed that she was an accident, but she was never old enough or bold enough to ask. And they loved her so very much, so what did it matter? She was, they always told her, their shining star.

And then they were gone.

“So what was the negative energy?” Gaby brought her back.

“It’s just . . . it’s a way of sort of . . . tracking my mistakes.”

“We don’t make mistakes.”

“Fine. A way of tracking my regrets.”

Gaby inhaled. “I don’t even know what that means, and frankly I’m scared to ask. It’s not . . . I mean, please tell me that you don’t, like, have some sort of Excel spreadsheet for regrets?”

An Excel spreadsheet sounded exactly like something she would keep. Cleo loved Excel spreadsheets.

“It’s nothing. I mean, it’s something, a list. But it’s mine. And it’s private, and no one knows.” Cleo said this stridently, like she would in a debate or on the Senate floor while pushing a bill, but she couldn’t totally be sure of the list’s secrecy. Had she shared it with MaryAnne during one of their hundreds of childhood sleepovers? Had she drunkenly mentioned it during the rare college party she attended when she blew off too much steam to deal with dead parents and a black hole of loneliness and a wandering ambition that she didn’t know how to tame now that her parents weren’t there to guide her?

Maybe she had mentioned it once or twice unintentionally. She wouldn’t hold her hand on the Constitution and swear to it.

“Still waiting for this big reveal.”

“My dad, he just . . . he encouraged me to write down all my regrets, so I could look back and see if they truly were mistakes, and if so, learn from them, and if not, learn from that too.” Cleo paused. “You never knew them, my parents. They were just encouraging me to be my best. This was one of my dad’s tricks.”

“Oh!” Gaby looked both mystified and confused. “Most people write down their goals. Or aspirations.”

“Right. This was kind of the opposite of that but with the same end result. I think. I mean, I’ve never done anything with it other than add to it.”

“Hmm,” Gaby said. Again. Then: “I wonder if we can use this.”

“Use this?” Cleo felt something unfamiliar rise in her: panic.

“Yes . . . yes!”

Gaby was on her feet now, towering in her heels, dumping the remains of her omelet in the trash to the side of Cleo’s desk.

“Let’s tackle some of these regrets publicly!” Gaby was practically shouting now. “Let’s build a road trip around this. Your summer recess. Film it, bring a crew, no, wait . . . home video on our phones so no one thinks it’s too orchestrated! Could there be anything more humanizing?” She clapped her hands together three times, as if she were applauding herself.

Cleo was on her feet now too (albeit in one-inch wedges). “You literally just told me that admitting weakness is a terrible strategy! Why would I air all of my mistakes?”

“Because you are owning them. You are showing up at MaryAnne Newman’s doorstep and sharing your regrets, not apologizing as if she were the victim, rather making amends because you have realized you have grown. People love growth in a candidate, people crave growth.” Gaby went still. “I guess I should ask . . . these aren’t egregious? I mean, there aren’t any dead bodies anywhere, are there?”

Cleo glared.

“Anything short of murder I can work with.”

“I think this is a terrible idea,” Cleo said, plunking back in her chair, which squeaked again. “Arianna, please get me some goddamn WD-40!” she shouted toward the door, not even bothering with the intercom.

“You’re wrong,” Gaby shot back.

“I’m very rarely wrong.”

“True,” Gaby conceded. “But you pay me to tell you the rare times that you are.” She paused. “How long is this list? Twenty? Thirty?”

“Two hundred and thirty-three. I think. Give or take a few.”

Gaby’s eyebrows skyrocketed to the top of her forehead. “Holy shit.”

“Some of them are small! Most of them are small. Like, I didn’t have enough cash on me, so I couldn’t properly tip the Starbucks guy, so I wrote it down so it wouldn’t happen again. And in my defense, it hasn’t!” Cleo felt a little indignant. Also a little hysterical.

Gaby waved a hand. “We’re not filming you returning to tip the Starbucks guy. Although . . .” Her focus wandered to the ceiling as she considered it. “No, not that.”

“I just don’t see how pointing out all of my flaws makes me electable,” Cleo said in as close to a whine as she’d ever emitted.

“Because we’re beating everyone to the punch. They’re going to pull you apart if you run—for a lot of reasons, but also because of your XX chromosome. You are going to go on a ‘no regrets regrets’ tour and show everyone how likable, how relatable you are, even when you’ve made mistakes, stepped in the figurative shit.”

Cleo probably looked unconvinced. Because she was.

Gaby softened. “Cleo, the easiest, cheapest shot is for them to paint you as unlikable. If you were the majority leader, who cares; no one would give a shit. That’s the luxury of having a dick.”

Cleo groaned.

“This will make people fall in love with you. It will be your armor against the inevitable other stuff—the less-than-kind stuff—that will come your way. It’s already starting with MaryAnne’s op-ed.”

Cleo started to protest but then stopped because what Gaby said was the truth.

“We’re going to make them love you,” Gaby said. “Then we’re going to round them up to vote for you.”