Cleo glanced at Bowen now, who looked more than a little concerned, but she waved a hand, as if her son dying of embarrassment were standard Saturday stuff. Actually, with a teenager, sometimes it was.

“Buddy, I did this because it was important to me. I’m supposed to be the voice of my generation. And I did something really, well, it was wrong. But what he did was more wrong. And I couldn’t see that for a long time, and now, when I could, I wanted to rectify it.”

The line was silent for a long time. She thought he may have hung up on her. She wouldn’t have been surprised. He was a fourteen-year-old who had just learned that his mom had been sleeping with a forty-something-year-old married man—her professor—while he toddled around in diapers. She could see it from his perspective. It was a little disgusting.

“I don’t get why you’re doing all of this,” he said finally.

“Because I want to make the world as level for young women as it is for young men, Lucas. It’s important. And it matters. And if I can’t do that now, what is the point of my power, of my position?” She paused, remembering something. “Speaking of which, please tell me that you broke up with one of the girls you’re dating?”

“Mom! Oh my God!” he screamed. “Jesus Christ! When will you ever stop turning me into one of your causes? I’m not!”

And then he really did hang up on her. Which shouldn’t have startled her but did anyway.

Cleo sighed deeply, fell backward into her couch, stared at the ceiling for a beat. Things were probably easier with Lucas when she didn’t meddle. She didn’t want to be a meddler! She didn’t even have time to really meddle. But if she didn’t, what if her son ended up just like goddamn Jonathan Godwin or Alexander Nobells, and then she would have failed at the one thing that truly mattered?

I raised an asshole. I’m sorry. Add that one to her list of regrets.

Bowen eased himself next to her.

“Should I go? It feels like I should go. I have . . .” He checked his phone. “Seventy-eight emails and a hundred and twenty-four texts to return.”

Cleo groaned. “About me?”

“Well,” he said, trying to soften the blow. “About this whole thing.”

“Kindly pour me a drink,” she said. She glanced at the time on the cable box. It was three fifteen p.m. Nearly five o’clock. That seemed fine.

Bowen rose and rattled around her kitchen, returned with a tumbler half-full of bourbon.

“No, you need one too.” Cleo shook her head. “If I drink alone, I’m basically on my way to becoming a cautionary tale.”

Bowen nodded a small nod, retreated to the kitchen, and returned with a tumbler in each hand.

She gulped down her entire pour. “More please.”

He dutifully retrieved the bottle from the kitchen rather than continue to make the back-and-forth trip, and this time he filled her glass nearly to the brim.

“You don’t seem like the type to get intoxicated in the middle of the day,” he offered, sipping his own drink quite slowly.

“Oh yeah, for sure, I’m not.” Cleo swallowed a good third of her round. “You see, Bowen Babson, I’m a very buttoned-up, important senator who has to maintain her composure at all times. If I make even the smallest mistake, the interwebs and the men on those interwebs and also sometimes extremely self-hating women come for me.”

Bowen started to interrupt, but she talked over him.

“You don’t know Maureen and Beth and Susan. From Seattle. And the things they say about me. Also, I am a mother, even though I’m just thirty-seven and never had much of a life, and mothers don’t do things like get drunk at three fifteen in the afternoon.”

“Well,” Bowen said in an attempt to slow her down, “some do. But they probably aren’t very good mothers.”

Cleo polished off the remainder of her second round. The bourbon felt warm in her belly; her blood felt warm throughout her body, actually. The room was feeling a little bouncier, the situation with Nobells feeling a little less pulse-pounding. She glanced at Bowen and suddenly found him extremely, extremely attractive. It was probably the bourbon talking, but then she reminded herself that she always found him extremely, extremely attractive. She had just never had the opportunity to indulge that.

She reached for the bottle on her coffee table, pouring her own refill this time. She held up the bottle to refresh Bowen’s glass, but he was still nursing his first round.

“I’m going to regret this tomorrow,” she said. “I have bourbon on my list, but I can’t for the life of me remember why.”

“You have bourbon on what list? Your grocery list?” He looked at her peculiarly. Cleo found this even more attractive, even at the same moment realizing her mistake. Only Gaby knew about her list, and probably her sister, but Cleo didn’t want to text her back and ask her and end up in a therapy session with Los Angeles’s life coach to the stars. Telling Bowen Babson, who seemed like the type of guy who wouldn’t have even one regret in his life, about her 233 regrets felt like an admission of failure. Cleo was well on her way to drunk, but even now, she knew that she could not present herself as a failure.

“Nothing, no list,” she said. “I just, I probably shouldn’t drink this.” Then she finished her glass anyway. The confrontation with Nobells and all that it stirred up was washing away, which was the point. She didn’t want to acknowledge that seeing him again, even all these years later, made her feel not just vulnerable but weak, even when this time she met him with strength.

“It’s funny.” She rolled her head toward Bowen. “I mean, it’s not funny, but it’s funny how even a decade later, seeing a shithead of a person can make me feel like I’m less than.”

“Less than what?”

Cleo rolled her head back to center, then dropped it on the back edge of the couch. “Just . . . less than him. Powerless. Alone.” Cleo thought of those first few days, when she couldn’t stop crying after her parents died and how that was how she felt exactly. Powerless. Alone. And how you didn’t have to lose your parents in an accident to tap into those feelings all over again. That’s what Nobells had done to her at twenty-three, reduced her to that naked fragility where she held none of the cards and he was running the table.

Bowen was silent.

“I guess I just regret it,” she said, quieter now.

“Regret confronting him or regret the affair?”

Cleo shrugged, squeezed her eyes shut. “What you don’t know about me, Bowen Babson, is that I have a lot of regrets. They are piled high, like, boom, boom, boom.” Cleo used her hand, karate chopping the air, to demonstrate. “Boom!” she said one more time, and this time inadvertently added an extra flourish and hit him in the eye.

“Ow, shit!”

“Oh God,” she said. “See! There’s another.”

Bowen winced and blinked a few times but did not appear blinded by her martial arts.

“It’s OK,” he said and managed a smile, which she thought was absolutely, unequivocally magnetic. She raised her hand to reach out, to touch his lips—she wanted to run her fingertips right over them—then realized what she was doing and plopped it back in her lap.

She aimed her face toward his again. She was feeling looser now, and she knew it was the bourbon, but the tricky thing about alcohol is that even when you know that you’re drunk, you very rarely say to yourself: self, you are drunk, and thus it doesn’t stop you from acting in ways that you wouldn’t if you weren’t drunk. It’s as if you are both in control and out of control, though inevitably the next morning, you conclude that it was the latter, not the former.

“I think you should kiss me.” She was staring at his lips, convinced that there was nothing she would rather do.

Bowen nearly spit out his drink. “What?”

“I think you should kiss me now.”

“I . . .”

“Bowen, I think it’s very obvious that there is something between us—you did ask me out, need I remind you, so let’s consider this our little date, and I think, therefore, that you should kiss me.” She paused, then added, “I’m a modern woman. I can ask for what I want.”

Bowen did not kiss her. He sat instead frozen beside her, looking more than a little alarmed, but because Cleo was well past tipsy, she ignored this particular emotion.

“Oh God,” she lamented. “Is it that I’m too old for you? Jesus Christ. That’s how it is now, isn’t it? Men only go younger, and women, I mean, let’s face it, I’m basically being told that I should settle for a man in his midfifties and will essentially be doomed to providing sponge baths and feeding him soft foods in the later years of our relationship.” She set her drink on the coffee table. Looked pointedly back toward Bowen. “This is bullshit, Bowen Babson. Complete bullshit. I don’t want to be giving sponge baths. Why can’t I date younger too?”

Bowen reached out, rested his hand on hers. “It’s not because I date only younger. It has nothing to do with that.”

“Is it because your generation—”

“We’re the same generation, Cleo.”