“You don’t have to—I mean, thank you, but I know you have work to do.”

“Girl, we all have work to do. You do yours for me, just like you did when you filmed that teacher of yours, and I do mine for you, just like I am now by giving you some coffee and Oreos, and maybe I can rustle up some Jell-O. In fact, I know I can. The nurse on the shift before me hoards it. No one really knows why.”

“Thank you.” Cleo bowed her head and found that she couldn’t stop crying.

“No woman is an island,” Mariann said as she rubbed Cleo’s back. “Even VIPs like you.”

The surgery had gone well, the doctor told Cleo. They’d gotten to the appendix in time, well before it burst, and now it was just the standard recovery—rest and TLC for a few weeks.

The doctor kept addressing Cleo as “Mom,” as in, “Mom, can you give him some TLC for a few weeks?” and Cleo very much wanted to direct him to use her name—she was more than just Lucas’s mom!—but after neglecting her son and his (now) obvious fever and his (now) obvious distress, she didn’t have the heart to push it. She’d thought it might have been a bit of spoiled food! She’d thought maybe he just wanted a mental health day! “Mom,” the doctor was implying, was a compliment, and she didn’t need to fight every ingrained battle when she knew the surgeon didn’t mean anything by it other than that she was Lucas’s caretaker, even when she hadn’t been a very good one.

Lucas was still groggy, so Cleo sat with him, enveloped by the quiet tranquility of his room. She held his hand, which was bigger than hers now and warm and occasionally trembled when, she supposed, he dreamed, and which he’d never allow her to do if he were awake. It was just the two of them, as it nearly always was. Cleo squeezed her eyes shut and rested her head on his bed. She was so weary from everything. Maybe that’s just how it was, with their little compact duo bracing against the world, but maybe it was also that it was so often just their little compact duo period.

Fifteen years ago, Cleo didn’t tell a soul about her pregnancy. At some point it became obvious in the late summer when she was entering law school, but Columbia was a fresh start—she literally didn’t know anyone—so she didn’t have to explain herself other than the occasional, “No, no partner, no husband. I’m doing this alone.” She called Georgie around the holidays when she was about eight months in and said, “Um, so I’m having a baby,” and it was clear from her reaction that Georgie didn’t know if she should be hurt that Cleo hadn’t told her earlier or overjoyed that her twins would have a new cousin.

Her labor came two weeks early. Because Cleo was Cleo, she had a birth plan lined up and a bag at the ready. She hadn’t taken a birthing class because she figured women had been doing this for centuries without learning how to breathe and push properly, and beyond that, she didn’t want to be the only one to go through a fake labor on the floor of a school gym without a partner. When her water broke while she was frying an egg for dinner, she efficiently flipped the cooktop off, called her doctor, grabbed her bag, and hailed a taxi. All on her own. It wasn’t that hard.

The contractions came quickly, so quickly that by the time she made it to the delivery ward, she was doubled over in true, visceral agony every two minutes. For a brief moment, she very much wished she had taken that Lamaze class, and if she were thinking about it later, she would add this to her list of regrets. Cleo McDougal was always prepared, and she didn’t know why she had forsaken that aspect of goddamn birth preparation because she would have had to acknowledge that she was single and lonely and a little bit terrified. She tried to get through a contraction and admonished herself for being so shortsighted, for giving in to the weakness of choosing emotion over preparedness. Yes, she had a bag packed and yes, she had read a birthing book, but would it have been the worst thing to have learned how to breathe?

It was too late for an epidural, and from there her envisioned serene birthing plan flew out the window. She grunted and she pushed and she listened to strangers—the doctor who was not her usual OB-GYN because her usual OB-GYN was skiing in Vail, the nurses who held back her legs—and twenty minutes later, Lucas, red-faced and mushy and looking a little startled to have arrived on the planet, emerged. Cleo had counted on a relaxed, measured birth, but you got what you got, something she’d remind her son over and over again as he grew older.

Lucas stirred from his anesthesia-induced sleep but didn’t yet open his eyes.

Cleo stared at him now, her handsome young man, and wondered how the time had gone so fast. She reached out, cupped his chin. She dropped her head back on his bed, waiting for him to finally rouse, realizing that just like when he’d emerged from her, tiny and perfect, it was the two of them, all alone in a hospital room.

For a long time, Cleo had figured this was the only way to do it. Now she wondered why she was so often alone in the first place.

Regret.

Lucas awoke and was feeling a little better, texting his friends, Snapchatting away. He complained that his wound was uncomfortable, and the nurses re-dressed it, and Cleo sat in the corner wishing there were more she could do to heal him.

A girl appeared in the doorway clutching a bouquet of GET WELL! balloons. Cleo recognized her as Marley Jacobson, one of Lucas’s paramours. She thought of Esme, all the way in Seattle, and wondered if she knew that she had only half his heart. Then she wondered if maybe Lucas wasn’t overcompensating by filling his life with loved ones to make up for the dearth of companionship that he saw in her own. She needed to talk to him about this, she knew, but for now she was touched that Marley was here, showing up for him, even if he’d probably also texted Esme for sympathy.

Cleo excused herself and wandered into the waiting area, hoping maybe someone she knew—Gaby, Emily—would have shown up, even though she hadn’t asked them. She knew Gaby was likely still at the office, fielding the calls and comments from her stint on Bowen’s show, which Cleo had watched on her phone while Lucas slept. Bowen had been both understanding and firm in his questioning, whether or not blindsiding these men was fair, whether or not filming them without giving them the opportunity of telling their side was just, even when he’d taken part in the very video that got it all started. Bowen had gotten his own blowback about that, of course, the journalistic integrity of it, but he opened the show detailing his fact-checking and why he thought it was a story worth exposing. The network stood behind him, though if the story had gone bust, maybe they wouldn’t have. Also, he was an extremely gorgeous white man. He was a moneymaker. His face was on billboards and buses. Of course he was easy to defend.

“I know why I got involved with this,” Bowen said as they were wrapping up. “But what about Senator McDougal? What sparked her to this now? And why?”

“I think the reason she did it,” Gaby said, taking a beat, “is because we all live with regrets. And Senator McDougal is addressing those regrets she can change now. Wouldn’t it be nice if we all had that luxury?”

“So there are others?” Bowen asked. Then clarified: “Other regrets, not men. That’s Senator McDougal’s business.”

Cleo worried for a beat that Gaby would betray her, share the revelation on national television that not only did she have further regrets but that she had a lengthy list of 233 of them that she kept in her top desk drawer where most people stored pens and paper clips.

“Bowen Babson, you know as well as I do, as well as any of your viewers do, that you don’t get through thirty-seven years of your life without making some mistakes. He who has, let him cast the first stone.”

“Or she,” Bowen pointed out before they cut to commercial. “She can cast that stone too.”

In the waiting room, Cleo stared at the ceiling, and then she stared at the floor. Gaby wasn’t coming. Emily wasn’t coming. Bowen, obviously, wasn’t coming. Matty wasn’t coming. MaryAnne wasn’t coming.

She understood that she hadn’t asked. Maybe, she thought, it was as simple as that: asking.

She picked up her phone and dialed Georgie.

TWENTY

Georgie flew in within hours. Literal hours. Cleo couldn’t believe how quickly she showed up.