“Where is this pizza place anyway?” Cleo barked. Nothing about this street looked familiar anymore. Back then, she and MaryAnne could have stomped down the avenue (in their Doc Martens, because in Seattle, even the semi-non-cool kids wore Docs) blindfolded and still found their way to Pagliacci’s. She spun around to the west, then the east, and was no better oriented.

“I can ask Oliver about him,” Gaby said. They were striding down the next block, simply to move from point A to point B. “Maybe he knows his deal.”

“Why would you ask Oliver about Matty? When would you ask Oliver about him?”

“Oh, we’re having dinner tonight. I figure, we fly out in the morning; why not?”

“Great,” Cleo said. “You both have dates tonight.”

“Mine is not a date,” Gaby protested, but Lucas said nothing, which made Cleo wonder if Lucas really knew what a date date was, and if so, how he did and when he’d been on one. Also, should she bring up the fact that Gaby was reading his texts on the phone and maybe he was technically cheating on someone back home? She wanted to raise a man who respected women but she didn’t want to be a mom who snooped on her kid. Though she’d read some studies that she should be snooping on her kid, so . . . This whole thing was getting out of hand. All she wanted right now was a fucking piece of pizza.

Before everything went south their senior year, she and MaryAnne used to split a Canadian bacon and pineapple pie. They’d trudge up the hill after school, on breaks from their homework and before going to MaryAnne’s (with the pool and the ping-pong table and the Pac-Man machine) and were at Pagliacci’s so often that the guys knew their order. They’d slurp their Diet Cokes until the ice rattled and pick the bacon off their slices and drop it on their tongues, nearly drinking in the grease. They’d talk about their own versions of ruling the world—it changed by the month. Sometimes it was through politics and sometimes it was through solving the hunger crisis in Africa or ending the Iraq War, and sometimes it was just making some boy who demeaned them feel small in a reciprocal way. Ruling the world could be both literal and metaphorical. This was before every T-shirt in the Gap screamed with quippy slogans like “This Girl Is on Fire” and “I Am My Own Future” and “#SquadGoals.” It was just them and their pizza and their aspirations.

Today, in the bright and welcoming Seattle sun, Cleo landed on the block that she was certain was the block. But where she expected to find her old pizzeria, she instead found a vegan bar.

“I don’t know.” She looked to Gaby and Lucas. “This was where it was.”

“Maybe it closed.” Lucas looked unfazed, like her introducing him to Pagliacci’s wasn’t about to be one of her seminal parenting moments. “I don’t care; let’s just eat here. I’m fucking starving.” Cleo glared at him, which he ignored.

“You know I’m avoiding gluten anyway,” Gaby added. Then she checked her phone. “Hmm. We’re back to about fifty-fifty on those YouTube likes.” She mulled something over. “Maybe we should rebrand the video with a snappy title, a headline like, ‘Cleo McDougal Has Regrets.’”

“That’s not really snappy,” Cleo said. “That’s just a word-for-word interpretation.”

“It’s a work in progress,” she replied, swinging open the door to the restaurant, which smelled strongly of wheatgrass and something so unpleasant that Cleo almost gagged.

All she’d wanted was a piece of pizza, a slice of her old life. She considered that all MaryAnne had wanted was a fair shot, a slice of her envisioned life.

The hostess welcomed them and saw them to a table in the back.

Cleo pored over the menu in search of something that could satisfy her craving. You got what you got. Sometimes you got an egg substitute omelet when you wanted Canadian bacon and pineapple pizza. Other times you were elected to the United States Senate while your former best friend ran for country club president. Cleo wasn’t one for tears, really wasn’t prone to complaining. Still, she could see where MaryAnne had a point.

She’d much rather be eating a bacon and pineapple pie.

SEVEN

That night, Cleo was in the bath when the hotel phone rang. She never took baths back home—who really had the time for an indulgent bath as a single mother and senator?—but with Lucas around the corner at his coffee “hang” (his word, not hers) and her emails read and answered, she figured she would pamper herself. She was debating pouring in shampoo to make bubbles when the phone, conveniently placed by the hotel on the wall next to the toilet, buzzed. She sighed, her serenity disrupted, and reached for it, her arm damp and spilling water on the floor. For a moment, she envisioned herself as a heroine in a romantic comedy, taking calls while in a (shampoo) bubble bath and living a delightfully quirky life.

“Hello?”

“Senator McDougal, there’s a Matty Adderly here for you.”

“A what?” Cleo sat up abruptly, and more water sloshed over the lip of the bath. “I’m sorry, a who?” (Grammar was important to Cleo, naturally.)

“A Mr. . . .” The concierge paused, said something with her hand over the receiver. “Yes, a Mr. Adderly is here.”

“I don’t . . . What?” Cleo squeezed her eyes shut. Had Facebook developed a technology where you stalked someone on his page and then he was shown your location and just magically appeared? Or maybe Matty was the one who was stalking her? Had she been photographed entering the hotel, and he just decided to come over? Cleo knew her recognition was on the rise (thanks, MaryAnne Newman!), but this seemed a little outlandish.

“Should I tell him . . . ?” The concierge seemed as confused as Cleo, though not for the same reasons. Obviously. It wasn’t her high school boyfriend who had appeared in the lobby out of nowhere after two decades of distance.

“I guess; I don’t . . . Can you please ask him to give me about fifteen minutes? I’ll meet him in the bar.”

She heard the concierge convey the message.

“Very good, ma’am. He’ll see you there.”

Cleo stared at the ceiling, recalibrating, then stood, grabbed a towel, and pulled the plug on the drain. Goodbye, shampoo bubble bath, she thought. It would have been nice. As she shoved her arms into a violet-hued blouse (she often wore violet, as the color brought out the blue undertones in her eyes and was always her mother’s favorite) and tugged on a pair of jeans, she resolved to chew out Gaby on the plane for setting off this entire godforsaken misadventure. Cleo was not interested in revisiting her past, relitigating her mistakes, falling in love with boys she hadn’t really been in love with in the first place. Cleo was not the heroine in a romantic comedy. And frankly, given that, at last glance, the comments and likes on YouTube and Twitter were trending toward MaryAnne, Gaby should know this and shut this whole thing down.

She swiped on blush and lipstick and brushed mascara over her lashes (because she was not a monster) and let out the topknot on her still-in-need-of-highlights hair. She wondered if she looked too much like she was indeed prepared to fall in love with Matty and considered changing. The blouse was a little too romantic, flowy and ethereal, but when she opened her suitcase, she found she hadn’t packed appropriately, so it was this, her workout clothes, or an athleisure hoodie that she wanted to save for the plane.

As she rode the elevator down to the lobby, she tried to think if she’d ever added Matty to her list of regrets. She wished that she’d reread the 233 items more carefully. He was probably on there somewhere. Nothing sweeping like: Shouldn’t have dumped Matty because he was the love of my life but something smaller like: Should have appreciated his generosity. Though, she pondered as the elevator door dinged open, that’s not such a small thing after all.

She saw him before he saw her, which was the benefit of arriving second. Sometimes, when she was entering a tough negotiation with her colleagues in one of her Senate committees, she (and they) employed this tactic. Arrive last. It made you appear less eager, less ready to compromise. Of course, sometimes you wanted to arrive first, just to let them know that you were a baller. (Being a senator was sometimes confusing. You’d never hear anyone admit to it, but it was true.)

She held her breath, blew it out, then strode through the restaurant to the bar, which was surprisingly crowded on a Sunday night at eight p.m., but Seattle was cool, so maybe no one worked on Monday. She didn’t know.

Cleo tapped him on the shoulder, and he spun around on his stool, startled, like he wasn’t sitting there waiting for her, nursing his beer. Even in the dimmed light, Cleo could see that he looked exactly like he used to, only a little craggier, which served him well. His blond hair was still thick; his stubble hadn’t grayed. He stood to hug her, and he hadn’t shrunk. (Why he would, Cleo didn’t know, but still, she thought it.)

“Clee!” he said with nothing but delight. “I’m so happy to see you. Thanks for reaching out.”

She pulled back from his hug, because Cleo was always the one leaving hugs first, and plunked onto the stool next to him.