The truth was that six hours was just not long enough to master the Dirty Dancing lift. Maybe for someone else who was not Cleo McDougal, it would have been. But there were a couple of issues in play, most of which revolved around trust—that Cleo didn’t trust that they wouldn’t topple over; that Cleo didn’t trust Francis (though she was trying), who was maybe four inches taller than her, to carry her weight; that Cleo didn’t trust herself to take the leap in the first place.

The rest of the steps were mostly memorization. Once that was down, Francis kept screaming at her to “put some passion in your hips” and “feel the sway, Cleo, feel the sway,” but Cleo did not feel the sway, and she sadly worried that she had no passion left in her hips because, honestly, it had been so long since there’d been a reason for it to be there.

With one hour to go before hair and makeup, Cleo was exhausted. She hadn’t worked her muscles this hard for this long in, well—she never had. Gaby, with her marathon training, would have been much better suited to this task, but it was too late for that. And besides, Veronica Kaye wasn’t showing up to see Cleo’s chief of staff leap into Francis’s arms.

“One more time,” Francis said and pointed to the far corner. Cleo skulked back and turned around to face him, chastising herself for ever agreeing to this stupid thing in the first place. Georgie was right: revisiting your regrets was ridiculous! Whatever made her think that one stupid day of dance could make up for thirty-seven years of not paying attention to the arts? This wasn’t connecting with her mom or her past or anything of the sort. She’d been a fool to think that it would, and now she’d have to be a fool in front of five hundred of Washington’s elites, not to mention YouTube subscribers. (She hadn’t realized there’d be video until this morning—Arianna hadn’t put that in the email.)

But Cleo McDougal did not like to lose. So she eyed Francis across the room and saw his outstretched arms and heard him shriek, “Now, Cleo, now!” and so she ran, and then she leaped, and she was as surprised as anyone that she nailed it.

TWENTY-THREE

Gaby ran into the greenroom, breathless, with just minutes to go before the show.

“Shit, I’m sorry!” she said. “There were so many follow-up calls after Bowen’s show, and a second lawsuit has been filed because of this hashtag—don’t worry, it has nothing to do with you—and then Oliver FaceTimed . . .”

She tilted her head and finally took Cleo in. Hair and makeup had tried their best to morph her into Jennifer Grey, but it hadn’t gone as well as anyone had hoped. Cleo had never in her wildest dreams envisioned wearing a shirt tied in a knot to expose her belly button, nor had she ever wished for wavy hair tied back in a bandanna or, frankly, false eyelashes and extremely pink lip liner, which the makeup artists said was necessary under the lights to make her features pop.

“Yes.” Cleo sighed. “This is really happening.”

Bowen joined them and double-kissed Gaby on the cheeks.

“We’ve gotten so many hits from your clip. You’re welcome back anytime.”

Cleo didn’t love the sound of that, not because she didn’t think that Nobells deserved to be dragged forever, and she was elated that #pullingaCleo was still a life force of its own, but because part of her worried that the longer this story stayed in the spotlight, the more the real rationale behind it—her long list of regrets—would be exposed. She knew this seemed paranoid. But still. She was sitting in the greenroom of the Grand Hyatt, set to do the mambo, dressed as a character out of a movie she’d loved in middle school, while her sister, with whom she had previously been more or less estranged, tended her son whose appendix had nearly exploded, so Cleo wasn’t about to be shocked at anything anymore.

“You look extremely adorable,” Bowen said to her. “If that’s OK to say.”

Bowen was in a vest with no shirt underneath, old-timey striped trousers, and a top hat, and somehow, though Cleo knew she and MaryAnne would have nicknamed him Mr. Peanut, she thought the getup made him even more attractive. She hated this.

“It’s OK to say,” Cleo said. “But don’t worry—I won’t take it the wrong way. I won’t try to kiss you or anything.”

“I wouldn’t . . . ,” Bowen started, then stopped. “Look, can we talk about this later?”

“We don’t have to talk about it ever,” Cleo said and then saw Francis gesturing to her because he wanted her to stretch out before they went live.

“Cleo, that’s not—”

But Cleo was already halfway across the room, having mentally added Bowen Babson to her list of regrets. Two hundred and thirty-four now.

Cleo’s nerves kicked in just as the lights went down and the emcee welcomed the crowd. Her intestines contracted and her hands started to shake, and honestly, she wished Georgie were here to talk her through some breathing.

Gaby was seated at the table with Veronica Kaye, who was trailed by her staffer Topher. Gaby and Veronica said a quick hello once Cleo and the rest of the contestants emerged from the greenroom. Ostensibly, being graced by Veronica Kaye should have calmed her nerves, but it did not.

“I just love that you are out here taking a risk,” Veronica said. Then she leaned in closer to Cleo’s ear and whispered, “No regrets,” which sent Cleo off into an entirely different anxiety spiral. Surely it was just a coincidence that Veronica had used such a common phrase, but Cleo—rational and pragmatic, her father’s daughter still—did not fully believe in coincidences, and she was unable to shake the sense that Veronica knew more about her than she wished.

Suzanne was up first. She and her partner were doing the Sandy and Danny “You’re the One That I Want” scene from Grease, and while Cleo was not keen on her own belly shirt and clamdiggers, she was greatly relieved not to be wearing vacuumed-on black latex. Suzanne was in her early forties but rose each morning to hit the six a.m. SoulCycle class, and though Cleo didn’t want to appreciate one thing about Suzanne Sonnenfeld, much less objectify her because that felt wholly un-feminist, she had to admit that she pulled off that latex quite well. Suzanne loved the spotlight and played to the crowd, and even though she was a horrible bottom-feeder who catered to the lowest common denominator of politics, she received rousing applause. Washington was apolitical when it came to dominance, Cleo supposed. And as she bounced off the dance floor and past Cleo, she leaned over and said, “I’d never eat shit for you.”

And then Cleo forgot about her nerves and her exposed belly button and Veronica’s odd encouragement, and she furrowed her brow and refocused and told herself that she was going to murder it out there. Cleo was quite good at willing. She was going to try to enjoy it too, she told herself, like her mother would have, but she was also going to murder it out there. Just to shut up Suzanne fucking Sonnenfeld.

A handful of congressmen and women and a few prominent lobbyists did their routines, no one embarrassing him-or herself, yet no one coming close to Suzanne’s. Bowen was second to last, and Cleo saw him shaking out his hands and legs with his gorgeous young thing of a partner and then, as the emcee called his name, shedding any sign of nervousness and throwing his arms in the air, encouraging the crowd to cheer louder, then louder still. He took off his top hat and bowed as if he had already won, which was pretty rich, Cleo thought—like a subliminal message to the audience that he had it in the bag.

His routine was not terrible. Quite a bit of flying elbows and snapping fingers, and there was one point when his kicks were totally out of sync with his partner, but he sashayed and shimmied and jived with everything he had, and Cleo couldn’t help but smile. It wasn’t that he was good; it was that he believed that he was good, much like Cleo had to believe she could nail the lift, and that went a long way in entertaining a crowd. Hell, Cleo realized, it went a long way in politics too.

The crowd gave Bowen a standing ovation, and he bowed three times, soaking it up. He was clearly the one to beat, unless Suzanne Sonnenfeld found a way to rig the ballot, and honestly Cleo wouldn’t put that beneath her. Still, though, Cleo thought that hers could be a sweet, sweet victory, triumphing over Bowen and putting a nail in the proverbial coffin of the bourbon situation once and for all.

Francis massaged her shoulders.

“You ready?” he whispered.

“Yes.” She wasn’t, but this wasn’t the first time she’d faked it.

“You trust me? Because there can’t be any doubt out there. When you run toward me, the only way it works is if you’re all in. I’ll catch you. I promise.”

“I’m all in,” Cleo said. She believed.

And then the emcee called her name.