“I . . .” Cleo slid her sunglasses on. The sun had cut through the clouds, and in an instant Seattle was the crystal-clear version of a postcard you’d mail to relatives back east. “He was my boyfriend for a while. Here.”

Lucas looked up, surprised, eyebrows raised.

“What? You think your mom wasn’t hot enough to have a boyfriend?” Gaby said.

“Gaby . . . ,” Cleo interjected.

“I’ve been told repeatedly by both the media and my teachers that I wasn’t allowed to judge girls on their looks,” Lucas said. “‘Hot’ hadn’t entered my brain.”

“Hmm,” Gaby said.

“Fine, ‘hot’ does enter my brain because I’m fourteen and not blind. What do you want from me?” He paused. “But he wasn’t . . . ?” He trailed off, the words forming a question.

Cleo understood his implication. He wasn’t his dad. She knew she could give him his name, that with the internet, Lucas could probably track him down before she was done spelling it (though it was not a complicated name that required spelling), but she wasn’t up for that kind of trauma, and she didn’t want her son to be up for it either. Single parenthood was already so complicated. Dragging her past into it would only make it messier. She supposed that she had MaryAnne Newman to thank for Lucas’s curiosity. Curiosity that felt like it would lead only to heartbreak. Couldn’t Cleo want to protect him from that? She didn’t know if she was doing it right, handling it right, but she just wanted to try to protect him. That didn’t seem like it was the wrong thing.

“No, love, not him. I haven’t seen Matty since graduation.”

Lucas nodded, tapped on something on his phone. “Whatever. I just . . . I can’t imagine you with a boyfriend.”

“Why not?” Cleo yelped. She didn’t want to remain single forever. Or maybe she did. She didn’t necessarily want to get married, but a little companionship and a steady date to the movies and perhaps the hot new Italian joint might be nice. If Gaby could make eyes at Oliver Patel and get a text an hour later, why shouldn’t Cleo?

Lucas looked at her plainly, with no judgment. “Because for fourteen years, you never have.”

“Well, you didn’t get here by immaculate conception,” Gaby said, just before Cleo could explain the difficulties of dating as a single parent and senator.

“You’re disgusting,” Lucas retorted, then pulled up Matty’s profile.

It turned out that Matty Adderly was a mad programmer for Microsoft and had figured out Cleo’s thinly disguised alias on Facebook and already sent her a friend request and a message. In fact, he’d done it months ago, long before MaryAnne Newman ever blew this shit up.

Cleo, Lucas, and Gaby began their long ascent up the hill to Pagliacci’s, which, in Cleo’s memory, served the best slice of pizza she ever had. It was only eleven, but no one had eaten much of a breakfast, so a pizza brunch on a Sunday it was. Lucas read Matty’s note aloud.

Cleo—

I hope you don’t mind my reaching out. It has been twenty years, but I see you in the news all the time—and this morning I went down the rabbit hole of finding you on socials.

(Cleo interrupted Lucas here and said, “‘Socials’? Who says that?”

To which Lucas replied, “Everyone, Mom, everyone says that.”

And Gaby added, “Clee, I think you’re already doing it.”

And Cleo said, “Doing what?”

And Gaby replied, “That thing you do where you don’t give people a chance before they’ve had any chances in the first place.”

So Cleo stopped talking.)

Anyway, I’m still living in Seattle, which can be a little claustrophobic, but I don’t really see anyone from school much, so it’s less horrible than you’d think. (I don’t actually think it’s horrible, but I’m sure you do.) ?

(Cleo couldn’t help herself and interjected again. “Did he actually use an emoji?”

“Yes, the smiley face with blushing cheeks,” Lucas said.

“Yikes,” Cleo replied.

“Give me a break—you sent me that one last week about scoring a goal in my game,” Lucas said. And then Cleo really did shut up because maybe she was judging Matty Adderly by standards to which she wouldn’t want to be judged either.)

I don’t know if you’ll even see this but if you do, I just wanted to say that I’m rooting for you, and it really makes me happy to see you succeed.

All best,

MA

Cleo, unprepared for the ascent, was out of breath by the time Lucas had finished. Gaby, because she was training for the marathon, was not, and in fact had taken to running up the hill backward, then sprinting down it to meet them, then repeating it all over again. Also, she had barely slept last night after her evening with Oliver Patel but seemed not at all affected. That women in Washington (and beyond, of course) were judged on their stamina was utterly ridiculous, Cleo thought, as she watched her friend bounce up and back.

“What happened with him?” Lucas asked as she jabbed the crosswalk light. No one in Seattle jaywalked, and Cleo was not about to break the rules of the city and be criticized for anything else.

“It was high school,” Cleo said. “What happens with any of that?”

Lucas narrowed his eyes, and because Cleo did not want him to disengage, she elaborated.

“When your grandparents died, I guess my singular focus was moving on. Getting through that grief intact. Living up to their expectations of me, which, I mean, not to be a cliché, I could never now live up to. And part of that meant getting out of Seattle and just . . . getting through things. Forging ahead toward what I told them I would do: rule the world.”

“It’s so nice here, though,” he said. “You couldn’t rule the world from here?” They each took a moment to look around, and each concurred that this was true. The air was squeaky-clean, the vibe was hip and electric, the mountains sprang up unexpectedly in the background with peaks dusted in snow. No one was in too much of a rush, but no one meandered either, and everyone seemed placid and accepting and, well, pleasant. You could just tell by the way people stood at the corner and waited for the orange hand to turn white and said “excuse me” when they stepped around you to peer at the coffee menu at Starbucks.

Cleo exhaled, and the light changed, and they crossed the street while she considered how to best explain why she dumped an extremely sweet person who had only her best interests at heart.

“It was nice growing up here, which is why I wanted you to see it. And I wish you could have met your grandparents, not just have seen the house that I grew up in. But . . . I don’t know. The longer I was here, the smaller it felt. I wanted to be the big fish in the big pond. That’s how I think I defined success back then.”

“I think it’s how you define it now too,” Lucas said as he stopped and peered into the window of a tattoo parlor, his hand above his eyes, shielding them from the sun. Cleo yanked his arm.

She didn’t press him because it’s a rough day for parents when they discover that their child’s wisdom has surpassed their own, even if that’s the entire point of parenting. So instead, she said, “You have to be eighteen to get a tattoo, and even then, it’s stupid.”

“As stupid as running away when you were eighteen?”

“Eighteen-year-olds make plenty of dumb choices,” Cleo said. “And I didn’t run away. I got into college. And then my grandmother died. And then what was I going to return to anyway? I wanted to go to law school. And then I wanted to get into Congress. And so on.”

Lucas’s phone buzzed before he could reply. “Oh. That’s cool. He just wrote you back.”

“He who?” Cleo asked. She was peering up and down the street, which looked nothing like the street she remembered from twenty years ago. There were espresso bars at every other storefront and impossibly hip clothiers and organic juice pop-ups and one store devoted entirely to essential oils. Georgie would love Seattle now, Cleo thought, and reminded herself to text her back. Which she already knew she would not.

“Matty,” Lucas said.

“Why would Matty be writing me back?”

“Oh, I wrote back to him writing you in the first place.”

Cleo stopped short, and a man with a handlebar mustache, a magenta vest, and rolled jeans, with an adorable yellow Labrador, nearly tripped over her.

“Why would you do that?” she nearly screeched. The man did a double take, and so she offered, “Sorry, not you. Him, my son.” So the man flashed her a peace sign and went on his way, and Cleo thought this was a very distinctly Seattle interaction. And it slayed her just a little bit in the best of ways. Maybe you couldn’t run away from where you came from as easily as she had thought.

“I didn’t, like, say that you loved him,” Lucas said. “I just said, ‘hey, thanks, nice to hear from you.’”

“It wouldn’t be such a bad thing for you to have a little romance in your life,” Gaby butted in.