MaryAnne Newman lived in the ritzy part of Seattle. Of course. Growing up, Cleo hadn’t been lacking, but she wasn’t part of the upper echelons of Seattle society. The kids who lived in Broadmoor or Windermere or just off the golf course of the country club were always kind enough—Cleo didn’t want to pin her ambition to class differences or bank accounts or that she drove a beat-up Jetta while they got new BMWs and Jeeps. Seattle was a town where, theoretically, everyone was welcome and embraced and peace, love, and understanding were taught and imparted and mostly put into practice too. Cleo never went without—her parents did perfectly well. But as the Uber wound through the wide, manicured streets, punctuated with high hedges and bursting rosebushes and blooming rhododendrons, Cleo so easily reacquainted herself with that steady bleat of “less than,” just like she had those first few times her mother dropped her at MaryAnne’s in elementary school. It was subtle, niggling—nothing that beat you over the head—just a small whisper of awe she felt walking into MaryAnne’s cavernous kitchen, eyeing the lush green backyard with a pool that had a waterfall. In the back of an Uber, she was nine again. Even though she was a senator. Even though she’d made something of her life that few of her high school peers could imagine. That she’d flown six hours across the country to apologize to MaryAnne Newman epitomized this: that despite everything, here she was, all these years later, hat in hand.

Cleo had dragged her feet all the way from the hotel restroom, where she’d polished her makeup and changed out of her merino wool sweater, which stank a little bit of perspiration. She’d snapped at Gaby as she touched up her eyeliner, run a brush through her blond-brown hair that was in need of new highlights that would return it to more blond than brown. She’d tried to pluck out three grays with her fingers but had no luck. She’d have to find time for a hair appointment before the next set of television appearances. Things like this mattered for women senators: shimmering highlights or too-long darkish roots or, God forbid, gray hair, could make or break your Twitter feedback. Cleo had never once seen anything of the sort for her male colleagues. In fact, one of the most reviled members of Congress (on both sides!) recently grew in some stubble, and rather than being met with disdain, this somehow made him more likable. Cleo had read headlines claiming he was now sexy. (!!!) All because of a fucking beard.

“Hold still,” Gaby had said in the Sheraton bathroom. “Please keep in mind that I’m not doing this because I want to embarrass you or make you eat crow. God, Cleo. When have I ever advocated for that?”

Cleo pursed her lips, because it was true.

“I’m doing it because I’m trying to protect you. My phone hasn’t stopped buzzing; your interview with Wolf didn’t tamp this down. MSNBC is talking about it now too; let’s not even get into Fox. Don’t you want to at least have the chance to be considered for the nomination? Because this could be over before it even begins.”

Cleo pursed her lips harder and met Gaby’s eyes in the mirror. Gaby was right.

“Apologizing is not my strong suit.”

Gaby handed her a pink lipstick that would ensure her pallor morphed from half-dead to at least having a steady pulse. “Tell me something I don’t know. And you know I don’t like you to apologize, not when it comes from a place of weakness. But there are all sorts of ways to say you’re sorry, and sometimes it can come from strength too. That’s what this is about. Besides, what’s the point of your list if not to make amends?”

“The list is for me! That’s what it was for. Who said anything about amends?”

“So your dad would hate that you are using it to become a better person?”

Cleo snapped the lid back on the lipstick and dropped it in Gaby’s bag. “I thought we were really doing this to have a shot at the nomination. Not because I needed to become a better person.”

“Touché,” Gaby said. “But maybe we can do both at the same time.”

And now the Uber was nearly at MaryAnne Newman’s house. It looked vaguely familiar to Cleo, and she realized MaryAnne must live in—or at least near—her childhood home, like so little had changed twenty years in.

“Wow. This is a super-nice area,” Lucas said, his head swiveling back and forth as he took in the old mansions from each window. “Did you grow up here?”

“No,” Cleo said, a seed of her old class insecurity kicking in, recalling the way that MaryAnne’s mom always looked like she had just come from the salon, with blown-out hair and perfectly pink polished nails. Cleo’s mom, even with her perfect dancer’s posture, was usually covered in paint splatter and wearing clogs. Cleo noticed only when confronted with the differences. “No. Another part of town. We’ll go there tomorrow.” She hesitated. “Well, I don’t know. We’ll see what tomorrow brings.”

Her old home had been sold shortly after her parents died, the money put away for college, with half of it going to her sister, who had by then gotten her act together, graduated from UCLA, and was working at some New Agey spa that Cleo scorned, even at fifteen when she and her parents last visited. So there was no house to tour in Seattle, really. What, exactly, was she planning—a slow drive-by of the beige ranch home that hadn’t been hers in two decades? Maybe that sounded more macabre than it needed to be. Maybe she could just park outside and say, “Hey, I was fourteen once too, and this is where I lived when I was.”

Their car rounded a curve and eased to a stop on the right side of the road, and Cleo couldn’t help but let out a little gasp of air. MaryAnne actually lived in her childhood home. She and Cleo had spent nearly every weekend here, because MaryAnne had a pool and a ping-pong table, and there was a brief stint in middle school, before they each respectively grew serious and cast all playful things aside, when her older brother convinced their parents to buy him a real-life Pac-Man machine, and that was really something.

MaryAnne had repainted the door bright red, but otherwise, the looming Colonial was just as Cleo remembered. She hesitated before popping the handle to the car door, nausea cresting in her throat. She wanted to grab Lucas and Gaby and yank them back in the Uber and flee. Her misdeeds toward MaryAnne Newman weren’t even on the list! (She didn’t think.) Now, twenty years later, should she regret them? She swallowed, waited for the unease in her stomach to pass.

She remembered a sliver of a moment their junior year, AP French. She and MaryAnne had both struggled on an exam. It wasn’t a big deal in the scheme of their world, but it sure as hell felt like one at sixteen and with college applications looming. Cleo had never come naturally to the language, but she bore down, gutted it out. Neither of them knew what exactly went wrong on this test, other than for the first time in their academic lives, they bombed it. Each sat at her own desk, slack-jawed and stunned, Cleo battling back tears, staring at the C-on her blue book. When she’d told her parents that night, ashamed and disappointed, her mom said, “Well, sometimes you have to fail to know where you can succeed next time,” and her dad nodded along, saying nothing. If they shared her disappointment, and knowing them they did, they didn’t make it known. Which, in hindsight, Cleo could appreciate. She’d do the same for Lucas. But three days later, MaryAnne asked her to hold her bag when she went into the bathroom to change her tampon, and Cleo—who was not even snooping—saw a new blue book with an A-written on the cover in their French teacher’s handwriting. It turned out, Cleo found out by sniffing around, MaryAnne’s parents had called their teacher and raised a stink, and she had been allowed a retake during lunch two days before. MaryAnne had told her she was having cramps and had gone to the school nurse.

Cleo gazed out at MaryAnne’s manicured lawn, so green that it nearly felt like an optical illusion, like a painting where the artist had intentionally used a verdant green rather than a more realistic one. She replayed her own shortcuts, ostensibly, her own regrets—the internship essay, the glancing at MaryAnne’s notes before she ran for the paper, the various other small but cutting ways their friendship fractured.

Yes, she thought. I’d do it all over again in a heartbeat.

So maybe not regrets after all.

FIVE

Gaby rang the doorbell, then scampered off the front stoop, so Cleo waited by herself, flanked by two towering potted ficus trees. It was an unusually sunny near-dusk afternoon—May in Seattle was hit-or-miss with the weather—and she reached for her sunglasses, an extra armor to shield her from whatever lay behind the door. When no one answered, Cleo allowed herself a small exhale, felt the knot in her stomach untangle.

“Ring it again!” Gaby stage-whispered from the side of the lawn. She was on the right; Lucas was on the left, their camera phones held high so as not to miss either angle of the blessed reunion. (Gaby had decided to film for backup.)

“No one’s home,” Cleo said. “Let’s go. There’s always tomorrow.”

“She’s in town!” Gaby whispered back, though Cleo was honestly not sure why she was whispering. The street was otherwise empty, and they didn’t have anything yet to capture on film. It wasn’t like this was an FBI raid, which, it occurred to Cleo, she would have been much more enthusiastic about. “Ring. It. Again!”