He bounced his shoulders, put a playful lilt in his voice. “Only good things, I hope . . .”

Cleo held up her free hand, stopping him from taking it any further. He was attractive, yes. More than attractive, fine. But she’d told him on the train why she’d asked him along. She’d explained the mission and the pain behind it, and though Cleo McDougal never really found much use for flirting, she certainly did not find a use for it now. Now was a time to stay focused.

“Please, can we just get through tomorrow and keep this . . .” Cleo drifted off, trying to find the right words. “Can we just . . . I’m a senator. You’re a reporter. That’s it.”

“But I did ask you to drinks last week,” he said, and she glared at him. “Fine,” he continued, “but I’m still not sure I get what we’re doing here. Listen, I do get Me Too. Time’s Up. I support it. I’m here for it. My sisters are constantly texting me articles they want me to cover on the show. Knit me a pink hat, and I’ll wear it and march with you.”

“Knit your own damn hat,” Cleo said. “Also, how on earth would I know how to knit? Do I look like someone who has time to take up knitting?”

“Point taken,” Bowen acknowledged. “But . . . this isn’t just about that. It’s about something else too. And the reporter in me wants to know why.”

Cleo was tired and didn’t want to rehash what she’d shared on the train, which had been about as honest as she could reasonably expect herself to be while also not being completely honest. So she’d told him the stuff about Nobells—about the shame she had repressed over the affair (MaryAnne did get that right) and about the power he held over her when it ended. He had listened as thoughtfully as he’d listen to one of the guests on his show, interrupting only to ask imperative questions, and in this way he reminded her of Matty: a deeper thinker than the surface would suggest. And just as she had reevaluated Matty back in the bar in Seattle, she had found herself reconsidering Bowen as the train whipped through the northeast landscape to New York.

Still, though, now was not the time to consider even a hint of that attraction. Over the years, Cleo had become an expert in talking herself out of romantic connections—thus, her dating life almost never went past three dinners and/or occasionally fooling around. Romance was messy and unnecessary, and she wasn’t looking for a husband or another child and certainly not gossip headlines, so she compartmentalized romance the way she would, say, buy fresh flowers. They’d be nice to have, but no one ever couldn’t get by without them. She relegated making out with Bowen to buying flowers. That was that.

“Seriously, Cleo, why are you doing this?” Bowen asked again.

She sipped her Diet Coke and thought of all those nights at Pagliacci’s with MaryAnne, draining their cups and going for refills. Bowen wanted to know why, and she wasn’t even sure herself. Why had she done a million things in her life? She just pointed herself north and went, especially after her parents died—following the ambition in her gut. But this time it wasn’t about that. This time it felt like she was running counter to that ambition. This time it felt personal. Why? Because she had caught Jonathan Godwin leaving the HRC dinner with a young replacement for Emily? That was too easy. Maybe it was because once MaryAnne aired the truth, Cleo couldn’t repress her shame any longer. She couldn’t tout herself as a role model for Arianna and her generation while also having wronged Nobells’s wife and having been a pawn in his game. Maybe it was time to address the power imbalance that ran top to bottom through not just the legal profession but educational systems too, and a million other systems beyond that. Or maybe it was simpler than all that: maybe it was just that Gaby, though she would be angry to know Cleo was running this show without her right now, was pushing her to face her regrets in order to launch a presidential bid, and Nobells simply couldn’t be ignored.

She could have chosen about a hundred other regrets from her list, though, and she hadn’t. And she’d come this far—literally about two hundred miles—to do it. But why now? Why this? Cleo wasn’t emotionally intelligent enough to clarify the heart of the why for Bowen. It wasn’t that she didn’t want to; it was that she couldn’t.

She shook her head as he watched her. She wasn’t about to tell him about her list. That was too far, too much, like stripping herself naked in front of him and pointing out all her flaws, asking him to circle them with a Sharpie.

Instead, she said, because this was also true, “Maybe it’s just time.”

She raised her shoulders, then lowered them, and though she understood he wanted more from her, he was also keen enough to accept that, for now, this was the most she had to offer.

Though Cleo expected Bowen to have fancy plans—a nightclub or, at the very least, dinner at the Soho House—he was happy, eager, almost, to stick around the apartment, loitering as if there were nowhere else he’d rather be. He hunched over, peered at pictures that lined her bookshelves—mostly of Lucas over the years, a few of her parents too. Cleo tried to relax and be, well, normal, that he was here, in her space, but she was not so easily adaptable. She found herself skulking into opposite corners and making excuses to straighten up Lucas’s room or refill the bottomless glass of Diet Coke in the kitchen.

She hadn’t heard from Gaby all afternoon, so Cleo assumed that she was knee-deep with Oliver Patel, and though Cleo liked Gaby’s input and feedback on her working weekends, she was relieved to have fallen off her radar. Arianna had uploaded her schedule to her phone, and her staff who worked out of Manhattan had touched base, ready for the few events and the meet and greets that she had with her voters. Cleo didn’t always head to New York City on her working weekends. Sometimes it was Buffalo or Schenectady or Albany or even the North Fork. Her constituents were varied and diverse, and ironically, though Cleo was a loner who despised small talk, she truly loved making the time to meet with them. Part of it was that they had chosen her, which, anyone with any sort of power can tell you, is a little bit intoxicating, but part of it was that they had chosen her to make a difference in their lives. She might be the type of woman who would sabotage her best friend’s hopes for an internship, but she was also the type of woman who could still carry around hope for change. Only Forward! Those two things weren’t incompatible, even if they seemed like they should be.

Cleo’s stomach growled, and she palmed her abdomen with embarrassment when Bowen jolted upright from a photograph he was admiring of her in London with Lucas. He’d heard it from across the living room.

“Sorry,” she said. (Why did she just apologize for being hungry? For her intestines shifting? Like she had any control over that!) “I haven’t eaten anything since DC.”

“I offered you my scone.”

“Ever the gentleman.” Cleo looped her right hand in two circles in front of her like she was a queen taking a bow, then realized she had no idea why she was doing this and stopped.

“Where can we go to get something to eat around here?”

“You don’t have plans tonight?” Cleo asked in a tone that probably betrayed her discomfort.

“Why would I have plans tonight? I came to the city at your request.”

“Right, but, um, I mean, we don’t have to spend twenty-four hours t-together.” Cleo found herself stuttering, and she did not like finding herself stuttering one bit. She also was aware that she would like to shower, that the grit from the train and the taxi and the few blocks they’d walked here when the taxi was at a standstill left her hair matted, her underarms a little damp. It wasn’t that she wanted to look her best for Bowen, but it wasn’t that she didn’t either.

“God, Cleo, relax.” Bowen grinned. “I’m staying at my sister’s tonight. I did make those arrangements.”

“I figured you had a penthouse in Tribeca made of glass.” Her gut rumbled again, and she sat on the couch, as if repositioning herself would quiet her insides.

“Why would I have a penthouse made of glass?”

“Everything about you makes me think that you’d have a penthouse made of glass.” She hunched over an inch, trying to squelch any chance of her intestinal tract shifting. She gestured toward him. “Like, everything about you. Top to bottom.”

“I thought you were smarter than judging a book by its cover,” he said. He picked up the photograph from London, examined it, rested it back down.

“Are you the book or are you the cover?” Cleo said.

Bowen laughed riotously, as if he didn’t give two shits if he were the butt of her joke.

He didn’t, Cleo knew, and she hated that she found this appealing.