She settled on the same violet blouse she’d worn to meet Matty in Seattle, which reminded her of MaryAnne, which reminded her of those sophomore girls from the park. She tugged on a pair of skinny jeans that she already knew she’d regret with today’s humidity, then reached for her phone and pulled up Facebook. Clicked on MaryAnne’s page. The comment thread to her op-ed had grown even longer, what with her ad having run a few days past. Cleo had told Gaby to stop giving her updates on the YouTube ratio because she didn’t need the approval of strangers. (Theoretically she did, if she were to run for president, but for now, no, no, she did not.) But the people she knew . . . well, she was learning that after thirty-seven years, maybe she did actually care about their opinions.

With Oliver jetting back east to his rendezvous with Gaby, she had one fewer defender in the comments. Instead, what she read was a frenzy, a pile-on, an online mob scene that she was familiar with because anytime she was featured in a big news piece, Gaby reminded her not to read the comments. Never read the comments. And here she was, reading them all. Cleo chastised herself: before MaryAnne blew this up, she’d never, ever have read the comments!

Susan Harris, Maureen Allen, and Beth Shin were still particularly worked up. They were using words like angry and bitchy and too tough for her own good. It was amazing, Cleo thought, her thumb scrolling downward through the comments, how society had done this—conditioned women to eat their own likenesses so they didn’t realize that if they banded together, they’d be unstoppable. Cleo’s thumb hovered as it struck her: she had done exactly the same thing to MaryAnne.

“Shit,” she said aloud. “Just fucking shit.” As an adult, and especially in Congress, Cleo had been careful never to alienate another female congresswoman (there still weren’t that many of them) and truly didn’t see women as competition. But maybe that lesson was learned only after she’d stepped on a few shoulders (and a few aspirations) to ascend the ladder to her current position. “Shit,” she said again.

She exited out of MaryAnne’s page and clicked over to Matty’s. He’d taken his twenty-seven-year-old girlfriend to Snoqualmie Falls for the weekend. There were lots of pictures of them hiking and eating hearty meals with jams and bacons and honeys. This made her a little sad—for him because it seemed like maybe he could use someone more complicated, and also for her, Cleo, because maybe she could have used someone simpler. Regret. She made a mental note to send him a gift basket from an amazing fishery that her colleague from Alaska was always heralding. It seemed like the type of thing Matty would get a kick out of—a delivery of salmon from Alaska on dry ice! She grinned, just thinking about the look of pure joy on his face. Then she recalculated: maybe she didn’t know anything about his girlfriend and whether or not she were simple or easy or right for Matty, and who was she to make snap judgments when she had just wished that everyone else would stop making them about her? Still, though, she’d send the salmon.

She checked the time and realized she was late, so she did her makeup in a hurry and scrambled out the door to meet Bowen, who was punctual and greeted her with a hug, which she did not recoil from.

“We can just walk from here, if that’s OK,” Cleo said as they started up Amsterdam Avenue.

“You’re the boss,” he said. “Though I’m still not quite getting this.”

“I told you,” she said, because she had told him on the train. “It’s about accountability.”

“Whose?” Bowen grabbed her elbow as she started to cross without a light, but then the traffic slowed and he let go and they crossed together, side by side. “And why?”

Cleo sighed. On the surface, without explaining the regrets list, maybe it did sound crazy: digging up the worst of yourself from your past, facing it publicly. But Bowen didn’t push it—he wanted the story, she knew: prominent senator confronts the man who may or may not have taken advantage of her a decade earlier—these stories were en vogue and generated eyeballs and frenzied Twitter threads and buoyant comments sections too. But he also wanted to protect her. She could sense that even without him saying so. I don’t need protection, she wanted to tell him. Single moms who have clawed their way up and through and beyond have long learned how to protect themselves.

Cleo didn’t want Bowen, or even Gaby, to tell her how to stay safe in a storm. She didn’t want Matty to ask who looked out for her. She did. That was just how it had been since she was seventeen.

Besides, sometimes you choose you. Bowen had every right to choose himself over her, to go for the story. If Cleo had been in the same position, she’d have done the same.

“I’m just trying to make it right,” she said.

“Make it right for whom?” They both did a little dance to the side of the sidewalk when a child blasted by them too fast on a scooter. Her mom yelled out from half a block away, sprinting to keep up.

Cleo thought of her list. She thought of MaryAnne. She thought of those two girls this morning. She thought of Emily Godwin and of Jonathan with his hand on the curve of another woman’s back. She thought of how angry Gaby would be that she was doing this without her. She thought of Veronica Kaye, who told her to lean in to difficult choices because that’s what turned you into a leader.

“I don’t know,” she said, pulling on her sunglasses, arming herself for what came next. “But sometimes making it right is just what you do, even if you don’t know what happens after.”

Bowen watched the child disappear around the corner of the block, the mom still flying after her. Something passed between Cleo and Bowen then, an understanding that he wasn’t her savior, and she wasn’t asking him to be either.

“I’ll follow your lead,” he said.

“Only forward!” she replied but found that the intended humor belly flopped, neither of them in the mood for jokes.

Tracking Nobells down was the easiest part. Cleo still had an alumni log-in, so she quickly accessed his lecture schedule and office hours, which remained the same as they had been more than a decade ago. Maybe it shouldn’t have been such a surprise. He, like her, was methodical and by the book (until he wasn’t). Of course, she couldn’t be certain that he’d be there. She reminded herself of this as she felt her pulse palpably accelerate as they drew closer. People change, habits deviate. But she remembered that he used to love spending Saturdays on campus, usually tucked in his office reading, away from the chaos of his family. Though technically these weren’t his official office hours, he made it known—or he had certainly made it known to Cleo anyway—that students were welcome to disturb him. She didn’t want to show up at his apartment; that wasn’t the sort of score she wanted to settle. Besides, this felt like neutral territory, in his old office, on their old campus, now that she was a senator. The balance of power having been leveled.

Cleo and Bowen reached the campus on 116th Street. Undergrad was still in session, wrapping up in the weeks as spring ebbed into summer, and younger versions of who she used to be scurried around them everywhere, backpacks weighing down their shoulders, messy buns atop their heads, iced coffees on hand to push them through their weekend cram sessions.

Cleo looked for the single mothers, the ones pushing infants or toddlers, with purple circles under their eyes and stains on their T-shirts. She saw none. She reminded herself that at Northwestern, in fact, she’d been unencumbered. No Lucas just yet. Not even a notion of him. If you’d asked her who in her life would have gotten pregnant her senior year of college, she would have said anyone but me. And yet, her fourteen-year-old was currently two hundred miles away at a pool party for his soccer team, so Cleo was starting to understand that she was not the best narrator of her own story.

“This way,” Cleo said to Bowen and pointed toward Greene Hall, which was a rectangular slab of concrete with more slabs of concrete running vertically through it. There had been a long-standing on-campus argument as to whether it was a hideous eyesore or a beloved near–work of art. Though at the time Cleo had sided with eyesore, she now viewed it from afar with affection, even with her growing nerves and her hard-to-ignore flop sweat. (To be fair, this morning’s humidity had given way to a sincere heat wave, and with not a cloud in the Manhattan sky, Cleo felt as if she were walking on the surface of the sun.) Beside her, Bowen swept his hand through his hair, which stayed aloft, right in the same position where his hand had exited, held there by his own perspiration.

Cleo swung the door open to Greene Hall and was met with the blessed blast of air-conditioning. “Oh sweet Jesus,” she said.

“And you tell me you’re not religious,” Bowen replied, then let out a little moan of his own.

Nobells’s office was on the sixth floor, so they wound their way through the lobby, garnering a few glances, but Bowen more than her. Senators might be celebrities in DC because they wielded power, but here, in New York City, his star-power star outshone hers. He waved to three girls giggling by the elevator bank before the two of them ducked inside.