“Is it because your generation needs, like, written consent? You have my consent, Bowen.” She grabbed his chin, forced his eyes toward hers. “You have my consent.”

Bowen gently removed her fingers, nearly clamped on, from his face. He stood, tucked the hem of his shirt back into his jeans. Cleo could hear his phone buzzing in his back pocket. She could hear her own phone buzzing from the kitchen. She wasn’t yet ready to face the outside world again.

“Please don’t go,” she said.

He cleared his throat.

“It has nothing to do with age or consent,” he said. She felt him taking her in, really, really breathing her in, in her wretched condition on the couch, full of self-pity and a little false bravado and a lot, a lot of bourbon. Cleo suddenly realized that she hadn’t eaten lunch. “It’s that, well, Cleo, it’s obvious to me that you have some regrets. And, to be honest, I’d rather not be another one.”

“You wouldn’t be, I promise,” Cleo said.

“Then we’ll reconvene without the bourbon,” he said before he backed toward the door. “That’s really the only way to find out.”

FIFTEEN

Nothing, not one thing, was better by the time Cleo returned to Washington on Sunday night. Lucas was still barely speaking to her, back to his usual grunting and holed up in his room. (Emily Godwin had dropped him off late Sunday afternoon before Cleo arrived back. For the return trip, Cleo rented a car rather than run the risk of making chatter on the train or, worse, running into Bowen on his trip back as well.) Her son had mumbled a hello when she poked her head through his doorway, and when she asked if perhaps they could sit and talk, he glared, and she acquiesced that they could discuss it at another time. She was also still avoiding Gaby, who had left her twenty-two messages and did not seem to be enjoying her weekend with Oliver Patel, mostly because of Cleo going rogue and having little to do with Oliver Patel himself.

Though Cleo had tried her best to ignore the breaking news about her confrontation—one thing she had learned over the years was that headlines rarely changed the nature of her decision-making, though polling from her constituents would, of course—this time the news was impossible to avoid. Alerts were sent to her phone, and commentators debated her tactics (and motives) on talk radio the entire drive back, until she settled in on an easy-listening station, which didn’t do much to soothe her.

Even at thirty-seven, Cleo had never developed a specific musical taste. She clutched the steering wheel, her nerves frayed from listening to strangers argue the gritty details of her choices in her early twenties, and wished she had. She hadn’t found time for art; she hadn’t found time for music. Maybe, she considered as she cruised down the interstate, if she’d leaned in even just a fraction to that part of herself that must lie dormant—she was her mother’s daughter after all!—she would have found comforts in something other than career success. She wasn’t apologizing for her ambition, and she wasn’t even sorry for where it had led her. But she could see how having a singular focus might have narrowed her perspective. She flipped to an alternative station but didn’t for the life of her see how the song playing was considered music, and then she tried the pop channel Lucas preferred, but my God, Cleo thought, the girl singing about losing her man was really selling herself short. And thus, she ended right back on the easy-listening channel, a milquetoast choice for aging millennials and Gen Xers who had no musical taste at all, which was worse, perhaps, than having terrible music taste.

At least then, Cleo thought, you had an opinion.

Bowen called her Sunday night, when she was tucked in her home office, reviewing her schedule for the week, and she quickly hit Decline, jabbing at her phone like it was radioactive. She wasn’t exactly sure what her strategy was here—with Bowen, with Gaby, even with her sister, who had sent another slightly alarmist text about her emotional well-being—but, much like her musical tastes, Cleo decided, maybe for the first time in her life, not having a hard line or a strategized plan was the best way to move forward.

This was not the best way to move forward, quite obviously. Cleo McDougal’s whole life, barring her pregnancy, was fine-tuned down to the minute. And she attributed much of her success to this streamlined, organized vision. But without any instinct on how to proceed, Cleo decided to chuck it all, to abandon everything. She gazed at the lights in her home office and wondered what would happen next if, say, she just stopped giving so many shits about being the best, about being anointed. Would MaryAnne Newman like her then? Would she still write op-eds? Would she still claim she was a bad person? Would Cleo still aspire to be president and crave Veronica Kaye’s approval and the massive check that came with it? Would Cleo have shown up at Nobells’s apartment for a dinner in the first place all those years ago if she’d just been content to be another law school student who passed the bar just fine, went on to a perfectly good firm, and pulled in six figures until she was forty-nine and decided to retire to open a used-book store?

After declining Bowen’s call, Cleo stilled herself and heard the throb of the bass coming from Lucas’s room. Normally he wore his headphones to shut her out, but this time, with this specific rage, he blasted his speakers instead, as if to say: even if you could come in, even if you were welcomed into this part of my world, I still wouldn’t hear you, and you still wouldn’t have access.

Her phone buzzed on her desk, another news notification.

Has Cleo McDougal Pushed the Women’s Movement Too Far?

She swiped up, clearing it from her screen.

On Monday, Cleo got to her office early—she had been so thrown off her routine that both her boxing class and hour-free phone time had gone out the window—but she still rose with the sun, a habit ingrained from the time Lucas was tiny and needed a feeding, and now a habit reinforced because it was quiet time to work. She usually dropped Lucas at school, then made her way in at a reasonable hour, but today he mumbled that he had a ride with Benjamin’s older sister, so Cleo commuted early, and Arianna was the only one in the office when she arrived. She was filling the coffee maker and nearly spilled the grounds when Cleo swung the wood door open.

“Oh! Oh my God, Senator McDougal! I’m sorry!” Arianna steadied the carafe, a look of genuine alarm on her face.

“Why are you sorry?” Cleo sighed. She was exhausted, not just in her usual exhausted way, which really didn’t faze her, but deep in her bones—emotionally drained too. It wasn’t even because of the news coverage—it was simply, Cleo was learning, the unending fatigue that came from stirring up the wreckage from your past. “Only Forward!” Wasn’t everything so much easier that way? When you didn’t have to unearth why you had sabotaged your best friend, when you didn’t have to consider how you turned over part of your future to an ill-intentioned professor? “What could you have to be sorry about, Arianna?”

“Oh, well, like, I didn’t mean to disturb you.”

“I disturbed you,” Cleo pointed out. “You were here before I was.”

“No, I know, you’re right. Sorry.” Arianna poured the water into the machine, clicked it on, waited for it to hum to life.

“You did it again.” Cleo wanted to curl up on the floor and take a nap. Could she do that today? Under her desk? On her rug?

“Shoot, dammit.” Arianna caught herself. “It’s a terrible habit, I know. S—” She stopped just in time.

Cleo swept by her on her way to her office. She did want to solve Arianna’s problems, but she couldn’t solve them today.

“Oh, Senator McDougal?” Arianna trailed her, watched Cleo flop into her chair.

“Yes?”

“I, well, I just wanted to tell you that I admired what you did this weekend. When I was at Columbia, we had a list of men . . .”

“A what?” Cleo was sitting up straighter now, not sure she had heard correctly. “A list of men?”

“Yeah, a list. Of, like, predatory professors.”

Cleo was suddenly awake, her eyes open wider, her heart pulsing faster. Maybe she really had underestimated Arianna. She raised her eyebrows as if to tell Arianna to continue.

“Right, and, I mean, he was on it. I don’t know why; I don’t have any direct knowledge of his behavior, but . . . I didn’t realize you were his student too.” She hesitated. “Maybe it doesn’t make it better to know that other women had concerns about him too. But, I don’t know, maybe it does.”

Cleo felt the sting of tears behind her eyes. She didn’t want to cry in front of Arianna, and she bit the inside of her lip to distract herself with a different sort of pain.

“I appreciate that, Arianna; I really do.”