“You say one fucking word about any of this, and I will sue you for defamation faster than you can run a reelection poll,” he said.

“I thought I was the only one you ever did this with,” she replied, her voice even, her tone serene. “So what’s your concern?”

“Fuck you, Cleo.”

“Senator McDougal, Alex.”

He looked less handsome then, Cleo thought. His cheeks flushed, a little spittle in the corner of his mouth. Cleo wished that all the young women in his law classes could see him as he was, a panicked shell of himself. She cocked her head and thought he looked like a cornered, defanged reptile, hissing and quaking but without its teeth, unable to puncture her skin.

“Fuck you, Senator McDougal. It didn’t have to be this way.”

“You’re right, Alexander. It probably didn’t.” Cleo shrugged.

“If I read a word about this, you can expect a lawsuit.”

Just then, Bowen stepped out from his angle by the door, his phone aloft, his hand steady.

“Sorry, Professor,” he said. “Too late for that. We’ve already gone live.”

FOURTEEN

It had been Cleo’s idea—to livestream it on her Instagram account, with Bowen mentioning it in his own to direct more eyeballs (he had 300k to her 48k)—because she knew if she’d done it any other way, asked him to report it like a standard story, edit it, interview her, all the usual paces—she’d have lost her nerve, and addressing her regrets list couldn’t be done without complete commitment. (Bowen had insisted on fact-checking the whole thing on the train, and Cleo had come prepared—forwarded him the aftermath emails, had shown him her GPA and her Law Review accolades, and, of course, some of Nobells’s texts when he was still heady in lust. Those were, for better or worse, stored in the Cloud forever.) Still, though, she was shaking by the time they hit Amsterdam Avenue, and she actually had to stop and lean over, her palm flattened against the window of a Taco Bell just next to Greene Hall, to ward off the nerves that had presented in the form of an extremely angry bowel.

Bowen was rubbing her back, telling her to take deep breaths, and trying to be as comforting as possible without violating any of her personal space. They were friendly, the two of them, but they weren’t exactly friends, and he, unlike Nobells, had been raised in a generation where you didn’t touch a woman unless she really, really wanted you to. (Or unless you were an asshole. Plenty of those too.)

Cleo heard the notifications on his phone, dinging one after the other. She felt the vibrations of her own phone, a steady buzz in her back pocket.

“Don’t tell me what people are saying,” she muttered to him, still bent over, still palming Taco Bell. “It was the right thing to do. So . . . just don’t tell me, OK?”

“It’s not all bad . . . at all,” he said. He scrolled down with his thumb, one hand resting on her back, as if he were checking to ensure that she was still breathing. “Actually, a lot of it is quite good.”

“OK.” She righted herself. Felt a little less green. She hated that her body betrayed her like this. She didn’t want her stomach to collapse into a mosh pit of gaseous nerves every time her past resurfaced. Or every time she resurfaced her past. She’d worked her whole life to be tougher than anyone expected, to be less penetrable than anyone demanded. She hated that these regrets made her more vulnerable, made her more porous. And yet now that she’d started down this path, she wanted to see it through. Even when it backfired, like making MaryAnne even angrier (though she was also beginning to see how she could have handled that one differently—this was not yet a perfectly oiled machine), like hearing Nobells threaten to sue. Maybe it was just that Cleo McDougal had never started anything that she hadn’t finished, or maybe it was because she really did believe that, at least for now, Nobells wasn’t going to touch another unsuspecting twenty-three-year-old, if he were so inclined, or box her out of a deserved position at his law firm, and what she lacked in power back then, she made up for now. And that had to be something.

“I could use a drink,” she said to Bowen, who was typing fairly frantically into his phone.

“What?”

“I could go for a drink.”

He stopped typing for a moment, looked toward her. “It’s two o’clock in the afternoon.” His phone buzzed again. “Oh shit. Here, this one’s for you.”

He held his screen in front of her, and Cleo squinted against the midday sun to read it. It was from Gaby in all caps.

Gabrielle: WHAT THE ACTUAL FUCK, BOWEN?

. . .

. . .

Gabrielle: TELL CLEO TO CALL ME NOW.

Cleo did not call Gaby. She did not call her sister, who did not call herself because they did not have that type of relationship but indeed texted to express concerns for her mental health and please, could Cleo reply? She did not call Lucas, who had been sent the livestream from his friends and texted to say: WTAFuuuukkkkk? and so she banged out a reply that said: I’ll explain, I promise. She would. Once she got ahold of herself.

Gaby left six more voice messages, but Cleo was in the liquor store by then, and all this seemed to matter less and less as she grew more and more eager to pour herself a bourbon. She knew she had sworn it off years ago on her list, but now it seemed too appealing to resist, calling out to her like the temptation of Alexander Nobells’s scruff used to, and for once, Cleo McDougal was going to be irresponsible. Or better phrased—for once, since she had become a mother and since she had become a senator, Cleo McDougal was going to get absolutely plastered.

“Do you really think you should?” Bowen kept asking, which she found extremely annoying.

“Yes,” she barked at him each time he asked. “I really think I should. And I have asked you to join me repeatedly, so you’re either in or you’re out, Bowen.” She grabbed a bottle off the shelf and spun around to meet his eyes. “In. Or. Out?”

“I’m . . . in? Only because I think you shouldn’t be alone.”

Cleo almost screamed right there in the liquor store on 105th street. She didn’t need a hero, and if Bowen Babson thought he could be hers, she’d rather drink alone. What she needed was a release.

Though she hadn’t betrayed it in front of Nobells, his very presence had triggered so much, too much, of who she had been thirteen years ago. Arrogant, sure. She couldn’t have undermined MaryAnne in the way that she had without arrogance. Brilliant, yes. She couldn’t have made Law Review as a single mother without brilliance. But also gullible—that she showed up to his apartment alone with a bottle of wine. Also complicit—that she’d sunk into his couch and didn’t pull away when he kissed her. Also guilty—that she let it go on for eight months, knowing he had a wife and kids—and it ended on his terms and through a fucking email and with him taking credit for who she was yet to be and on top of it all, firing her from the law firm—a position she had earned long before Alexander Nobells swooped in, saying whatever he said to the dean to ruin a chance to learn from the AG too.

So yes, she thought that she deserved a fucking drink.

“My producer is already making calls,” Bowen said as the cashier rang up Cleo’s three bottles. “He’s digging in, seeing if there are others. If there are, you’ll be a hero.”

“If there aren’t?” Cleo wondered if she could open the bourbon in the store and take a swig. No, probably not. She was still a senator, after all. “Then I guess I’ll just be a crazy ex-lover who slept her way to the top.”

“I didn’t say that!”

“No, you don’t have to.” Cleo grabbed the paper bag, thanked the cashier. “Everyone else will instead.”

Cleo finally succumbed to her phone just as they arrived back at her apartment. She was actively ignoring Gaby, but her son, well, she needed him to know that she was hanging in.

“I’m OK, Lucas,” she said when her phone buzzed again and she saw his caller ID.

“You’re OK?” he screamed. “You think I’m calling to see if you’re OK?”

Cleo quickly ascertained that she had miscalculated. Maybe she should have taken Gaby’s call instead. It probably would have been less confrontational. She hadn’t told Lucas about her plan because she didn’t want to worry him, and honestly, she thought he’d be proud of her once he understood.

“Luc—”

He cut her off. “Do you have any idea how mortifying it is to learn at, like, my soccer pool party that my mother is chewing out some guy she used to sleep with?” (He really did screech this in all italics.)

“Lukey, please stop; give me a chance—”

He cut her off again. “I don’t get you. You’re all Miss Follow Every Rule, and now you’re, like . . . you’re blowing everything up! You’re making a mess, and I want to die!”

“You don’t want to die, sweetie.”

“If. I. Could. Die. Of. Embarrassment. I. Would.”