“I am treating you like a sister,” Georgie said. “Two things can be true at once.”

This phrase reminded Cleo of Gaby, and it occurred to her that Gaby must be responsible for this mess. She couldn’t believe that she’d do such a thing—share Cleo’s most vulnerable admissions with the world. But perhaps she loved Gaby so much because they were so alike—she’d do anything for the win. Maybe Gaby just thought the list was another tool to use to her (and their) advantage. None of this rationale made Gaby’s betrayal sting any less. Cleo thought of MaryAnne and wondered if this wasn’t how she felt when her parents had called their connection at the mayor’s office and learned that she’d have been in contention for the internship if not for her terribly trite, unimaginative essay.

Cleo blew out her breath. She was used to problem-solving, and she knew that the best way was to tackle one issue at a time. First Lucas. Then Gaby. Maybe, eventually, MaryAnne too.

“Can you walk me through what happened?” she asked. “And look, I’m sorry; I didn’t mean to yell.”

Georgie accepted the apology by pouring her a glass of merlot from an open bottle that was sitting on the counter.

The long and the short of it was that while Georgie was watching the YouTube feed (and presumed that Lucas was doing the same in his room), a story broke and spread on Twitter that Cleo McDougal kept a list of regrets, which was not a particularly lurid story in and of itself. But one fringe website grabbed the piece and posited that it was actually a hit list on her political enemies, and that was all the internet needed—the scent of the potential gossip was too much for the Twittersphere to resist. Never mind that this was incorrect; never mind that very little of Cleo’s list had anything to do with politics, at least not in recent years once she’d hit her stride as a senator.

Of course, from there, Twitter blew the story into theoreticals, what-ifs, and I bets—it didn’t take long for people to leap from her confrontation to Nobells to postulating on Lucas’s paternity, that perhaps the father was a powerful political figure, that perhaps Cleo had been protecting him all these years, that perhaps the personal and the political were all tied together and they resulted in her son.

Georgie explained to Cleo that she hadn’t initially seen the story and grew concerned only when she heard loud thuds coming from Cleo’s office, where she discovered Lucas upending her files and bookshelf, which he shouldn’t have been doing for a variety of reasons, not least because of the delicate state of his surgical incision.

“He was understandably quite upset,” Georgie said. “But the twins have their moments too. It was all very . . .” She took a long swallow of the wine. “Well, I thought it was a fairly reasonable reaction.”

“To learning that his mom has made mistakes?”

Georgie leveled her with a look. “You know that’s not what he was upset about, Cleo. You do him a disservice by pretending that he is naive enough to believe everything you’ve told him.” She paused. “I just think it didn’t take him long to connect the dots, you know. To hear about your list and then hear the speculation on the paternity stuff, to, well . . . here we are.” She sighed. “I am always supportive of my clients writing down their mistakes or composing letters to those who have wronged them. But, Cleo, then they burn them or toss them in the trash. They never send them! I told you: there’s a danger in carrying your past around with you.”

“I don’t carry my past around with me. That’s half my problem! That’s why I am always on my own.”

“But you do, Cleo.” Georgie nodded as if this were fact. “You do, in not telling Lucas about his father or not acknowledging your role in whatever stupid teenage stuff happened with the girl who used to be your best friend. You can act like it doesn’t exist by shutting it out, but then it just takes up more space, not less.”

Cleo didn’t feel like being psychoanalyzed. She set her wine down too hard on the counter, where it sloshed over the lip of the glass and spilled. It would leave a stain if she didn’t attend to it, but oh well. Regret. Maybe that would just be the permanent reminder of this entire terrible night. The red blot on her marble counter—just look at that metaphor! she wanted to scream at Georgie, but instead she turned and plodded up the stairs toward her son.

Lucas was back in bed with his navy duvet pulled up to his neck and his noise-canceling headphones on his ears. Her yellow sheets of paper, torn from the pad, were scattered on the comforter. Cleo paused in the doorway at the sight of the list, out in the world, and she didn’t think she’d ever felt more exposed.

His eyes were closed, and she wasn’t sure if he were sleeping, so she sat delicately on his bed and gathered up the papers and tidied them in her lap. She knew she was buying herself time. She stared at her son, so handsome and nearly an adult, for an inhale of a beat. His long eyelashes, his lanky body that extended almost the length of his bed, his bone structure that wasn’t hers, she knew, his near-black hair that wasn’t hers either.

Cleo touched his arm, then let her hand rest there, and he stirred, opening his eyes but unwilling to look her way. She could feel her heart beating and wished, so very much, that it hadn’t come to this. That of the millions of ways they could have discussed the truth of his father, it didn’t come down to him seeing the entry from the spring of fifteen years ago that read:

So stupid!!! Why would I not insist on a condom!! Thought getting drunk would help but when does it ever help??

And then, eight weeks later:

Pregnant. I can’t believe it. Now what.

And then, a decade later:

Hate lying to Lucas. Hate it hate it hate it. But remember it is for the best.

And then a year after that:

Dad questions again. Maybe I should have told him the truth about Doug from the beginning.

“Lucas.” Cleo shook his arm. “Please talk to me. I want to talk.”

Lucas stared at the opposite wall. Cleo could see he’d been crying, which shattered her already fragile heart. Lucas, like Cleo, had never been a crier, though it was clearly a habit that she had taken up lately. But looking at his ruddy cheeks and pinkish eyes, she knew how wrecked he must have been, and she also knew that she alone was responsible.

“Is your music on?” she asked.

He firmed his jaw, and she knew he could hear her.

“OK, I just . . . You don’t have to say anything,” Cleo started, then couldn’t imagine what to say next. She didn’t know what she thought—that they could go their whole lives, just the two of them, their peas in a pod, and she’d never be honest with him? Maybe, selfishly, yes, that’s what she had thought. When she made the decision fifteen years ago, she hadn’t been clear-eyed on what it would mean, the ramifications of the choice she made as her zygote became an embryo, which became a child who became an inquisitive teen. It was easier to just say: he hadn’t wanted to be involved, which Lucas accepted, often begrudgingly, but accepted all the same, until now. Cleo considered that it was easier for her, not for Lucas, and the shame of her selfishness spread through every cell.

“I didn’t really know your father,” she said, then corrected herself. If she were going to tell Lucas the truth, it needed to be whole. “No, I should say, I didn’t know him at all.”

Lucas registered something like disgust at the notion of his mother’s one-night stand. Fair, Cleo thought.

“It, well, I . . . I did not have an active social life in college or really an active romantic one,” she continued, and Lucas rolled his eyes and returned his stare to the wall. “I was very singularly focused on my next steps and my future, and I just didn’t see the point of fun.” Cleo knew he was still listening because his eyebrows rose and lowered as if to say: what a surprise.

“Well, my suitemates were going out one night, and they invited me. And I’d already gotten accepted to law school, but I had had a terrible day—my thesis professor had told me he thought my work was subpar and that I was going to have to redo four chapters . . .” Cleo drifted at the memory of how personally she had taken the criticism. How much she spiraled, how in hindsight, her professor was just trying to prepare her for law school by demanding excellence. “Anyway, I guess I needed to blow off some steam, to just . . . not be Cleo McDougal for a night, and so when my roommate, Anna, begged me to go out with her—I mean, she didn’t have that many friends either—I let her convince me.”