ONE

Cleo McDougal is not a good person. She does good, yes, but doing good and being good aren’t the same thing, now, are they?

Cleo McDougal did not see the op-ed or this opening line in said op-ed on the home page of SeattleToday! until approximately seven fifteen a.m., after she had completed her morning at-home boxing class, after she had showered and meticulously applied the day’s makeup (a routine that she admitted was getting lengthier and more discouraging at thirty-seven, but Cleo McDougal had never been one to shy away from a challenge), and after she had roused her fourteen-year-old from his bed, which was likely her day’s hardest ordeal.

Of course, she had not yet seen the op-ed. By the time she did, the political blogs had picked it up and run with it, which was why it took off, blazing around the internet and Twittersphere. (SeattleToday!, a hipster alternative online “paper,” would otherwise really never have landed on Cleo’s radar.)

She had made a rule, which was clearly a mistake—she could see that now—to give herself one hour in the mornings before checking her phone. This was not a hard-and-fast rule, and obviously she scrolled through the news and quickly glanced at her emails while still in bed, before the sun rose over Washington. But it had come to her attention that, well, she needed to be a little more . . . Zen. Voters liked Zen. But they also liked tenacious and prepared and simultaneously calm and confident (and a laundry list of other things—pretty, warm, tough but not too tough, sharp-tongued but not a grandstander . . . you get the idea), and so when Gabrielle, her chief of staff, said that her own therapist advised taking one hour in the morning to unplug so that she absolutely did not completely lose her mind, Cleo thought it might not be a bad idea to test-drive.

It was only day four. She was liking it. She did indeed feel a little calmer, a little more serene, at least until she had to wake Lucas, when the previous hour’s tranquility usually spiraled into a bit of a spat, but she defied anyone to enjoy their morning with a teenager who mostly communicated by grunting.

Surprisingly, Lucas was the one who saw the op-ed first. Perhaps not all that surprising, since he and his phone were nearly telepathically connected, but surprising still because Cleo was, need it be said, a senator, and theoretically her staff should have given her the heads-up on a hit piece published in her childhood hometown, which then took off online like a match to gasoline.

“Who’s MaryAnne Newman?”

Lucas was hunched over the kitchen island in their three-bedroom condo, picking over an Eggo, one of the few things he’d agreeably eat for breakfast, and Cleo wasn’t sure she had heard him correctly. She had never mentioned MaryAnne to Lucas, rarely talked about that time in her life. It wasn’t that she didn’t think of MaryAnne—she did. But she also spent a lot of time trying not to think about her. How can you drive away from your past without even glancing in the rearview mirror? That kind of focus took effort.

“What?” Cleo turned toward Lucas, her coffee perilously close to sloshing over the rim of her mug. (Gabrielle had also recommended that she limit her coffee intake, but that was when Cleo pulled rank and told her she would sooner sleep with William Parsons, the Senate majority leader, who bore a striking resemblance to a walrus, than abandon coffee, and Gaby knew it was not a battle worth pursuing.)

“MaryAnne Newman,” Lucas muttered, which was one step above a grunt, and thus Cleo was almost delighted.

“Are you—are you on Facebook?”

Lucas rolled his eyes, which was much more like him. “No. Have you not seen this?”

He held out his phone, and Cleo stepped closer.

“She wrote about you. And . . . I guess me? I got a news alert.”

“You have a Google alert on me?”

Lucas’s eyes could not have gone farther back into his head. “No. Jesus. It came up on my phone alerts. They do that now, you know, like, send breaking news to your phone.” He shrugged. “I guess everyone who has an iPhone probably got it.” He swallowed. “Also, I’m assuming what she wrote wasn’t true? Or is it? Because then—”

Lucas stared at her, eyelids lowered, an indecipherable mix of teenage disdain and ire and, Cleo detected, something more. Her heart rate accelerated. MaryAnne didn’t even know Lucas; their lives had diverged well before he came along. What could she possibly be writing about?

Cleo patted her pockets, in a slightly more desperate search for her own phone now, then realized it was still in her home office boxing studio guest room (though they never had guests), resting, waiting, recharging, like it wasn’t an imminent time bomb.

Lucas pulled his screen closer, read the opening lines.

“Cleo McDougal is not a good person. She does good, yes, but doing good and being good aren’t the same thing, now, are they? In fact, her whole life, Cleo McDougal has been a cheater. She cheated in high school, on the debate team, on the school paper, for a summer internship, and from there it only got worse.”

“That is not true,” Cleo said to Lucas. Though maybe it was, just a little? Leave it to MaryAnne to thread the needle between rumor and fact. Cleo almost snorted, it was so familiar.

“Keep reading,” he said, passing his phone across the counter.

Cleo skimmed the next paragraph, detailing old grudges that felt irrelevant twenty years later, until she saw it. The reason for the hint of whatever it was in Lucas’s eyes.

“I have recently learned that this pattern of cheating extends all the way to Cleo’s personal life. I support women and their myriad choices, but when these choices reflect on their moral and ethical compass—something we must all agree is critical for presidential material—it bears stating publicly. A reliable source recently reached out to me, knowing we grew up together, to disclose that while at law school, Cleo had a torrid affair with a married professor, and, I quote here, ‘many people have since suspected that he could be the father of her son.’ I share this information not to shame her—”

Cleo slammed down the phone; she didn’t need to read further. Of course MaryAnne would play the smug card! she thought. That. Conniving. Bitch, she also thought.

“Is that true?” Lucas’s voice was softer now, more like the kid he used to be, less like the man he nearly was. Cleo’s stomach nearly leaped through her throat.

“No. Sweetie, no.” Cleo reached out and mussed his hair, which he did not particularly like and which did not play nearly as naturally as Cleo hoped, a ruse to buy her time. “You know that isn’t right—I was already pregnant at law school. MaryAnne is just passing on gossip that she didn’t even bother to fact-check. I assume that’s why she published it in . . .” Cleo batted her hand around, as if she were shooing a fly. “Whatever this ridiculous excuse for a news website is.”

Lucas chewed his lip and digested this. They’d been over this—his father. They’d had long discussions about it, and damn you, MaryAnne Newman, for bringing this back into their lives all over again. Cleo had settled it for Lucas—that his dad wasn’t involved and didn’t want to be, and that it was just the two of them, it had always been just the two of them, and that was fine. Lucas used to ask more questions about it when he was younger, but lately they’d somehow silently agreed that, like many things, especially in DC, where alliances were often fluid, it was ancient history. His father wasn’t around, and that was that, and Cleo and Lucas were peas in a pod. (They weren’t really, now that Lucas was an ornery teenager, but Cleo tried to remember that this was all very developmentally normal.)

“So who’s MaryAnne Newman? And why would she write this?”