“I find that offensive. We consider ourselves more geeks than nerds,” he joked, which kind of astonished her because she didn’t remember him ever being even remotely funny, much less sarcastic. “But no.”

Something about his no felt definitive, and Cleo sank an inch in her barstool. Maybe it was the two martinis; maybe it was the heady whirl of nostalgia these past two days had brought, but she suspected she wasn’t thinking very clearly. She very much wanted Matty to kiss her, twenty years later, in the bar at the Sheraton, but perhaps he could see it better than she could, and they really would never have worked. (Something Cleo would have sworn to not ninety minutes earlier.) He had always been good at advice and even better at listening. Back then, she took this as a form of weakness. She had wanted someone stronger than her, but two decades later, Cleo realized that perhaps she hadn’t needed, still didn’t need, someone stronger than her. What she needed was someone to complement her. She resolved right there in the Sheraton bar to make sure that Matty remained in her life, even if he wasn’t going to buckle her knees with a kiss right now. (She wouldn’t protest.) She wasn’t long on friends, and yes, that was a real regret, whether or not she had added it to her list. (She may have, though; she’d have to check.)

“Do you think I was a bitch to MaryAnne in high school?” she asked. Matty would tell her the truth.

“I think MaryAnne is working out some of her own issues, especially with that stuff about the affair. We’re rapidly approaching our midlife-crisis age.”

Cleo had evaded enough interview questions in her time to know a dodge when she heard one.

“But I was a bitch?”

Matty sighed. “It’s a confusing time.” He waved to the bartender. Cleo hoped he wasn’t signaling for the check.

“High school?”

“Well, I mean, sure, but I was talking about now.”

Cleo still wasn’t clear on what he meant, but she never liked to betray any unknowingness, so she said nothing. In politics, unknowingness made you a target. Probably in life too. She wasn’t sure because she never let on. Instead, she’d research and she’d study and she’d dig deeper, staying all those late nights at the office while the heroic Emily Godwin dropped Lucas off at home, and solve for whatever question mark had been presented. Until no question mark remained. She might have been a bitch, but she was a bitch who did her homework.

Finally Matty said, “I mean, look. I’m just a white dude who lives in a loft with his Microsoft money, so correct me if I’m wrong. And I don’t want to speak out of turn. But it seems to me that when women talk about supporting women, neither of you put your best foot forward back then.” He hesitated, staring at the grains of wood on the bar, seemingly uneager to meet her eyes. “And now? I’d think that you’d each know better.”

Cleo sighed, then rested her head on his shoulder, surprising herself. She had never thought of him as particularly smart, but it turned out that he was actually quite wise. Regrets, she thought, maybe I have one more.

Lucas wasn’t back in the room by the time Cleo headed up, after Matty had paid the tab. (He insisted, then also admitted he was dating a twenty-seven-year-old, and then it was her turn to redden because Cleo had evidently wildly misread his intentions.) Afterward, in front of the elevator bank, they had hugged; he told her not to be a stranger. She promised that she wouldn’t, and unlike her promises to Georgie, she thought—she hoped—this was one she could keep.

“It’s funny,” he said to her after he kissed her cheek, “how people can come in and out of your lives after so many years away and how maybe they matter in different ways than they used to.”

“So I have your vote?” Cleo joked because Matty was being sincere again, and though she really, really wanted to appreciate that side of him, she also wasn’t used to nearly anyone in her orbit ringing with sincerity. Sure, she was passionate about some of her pet issues—school funding and equal pay and all that—but sincerity also meant vulnerability, and vulnerability in politics meant blood.

“You have my vote,” he said. “And now you have my cell. So call anytime.”

“I will.” She nodded, and she remembered again how wonderful he had been when her parents died, and so she repeated, “I will.”

In her room, Cleo pulled off her violet blouse and jeans, folded them in her suitcase, and grabbed her pajamas, which she’d hung in the closet. She preferred them to be unwrinkled; she didn’t really know why. Lucas made fun of this, but he balled up all his clothes and dumped them in the corner of his room, so he was in no position to judge.

It was nearly one thirty in the morning East Coast time, so she should have been tired. But everyone knew that Cleo McDougal could run on coffee fumes and ambition, a habit honed early, mostly out of necessity when Lucas was a baby and it was just the two of them. Now this was one of her strong suits within the Senate—not her lack of sleep but her grit, her determination, her ability to work through just about anything.

Like her world upending when the police came to MaryAnne’s house that night of the helicopter crash, because they’d already tried her own home, and told her the news. She and MaryAnne had been poring over U.S. News & World Report college rankings and assessing where they had the best shot. Then MaryAnne’s mother opened the bedroom door, looking like she was about to faint, and then the police guided Cleo to their living room couch, and that was that. Georgie flew up from Los Angeles the next morning and . . . Cleo tried to remember where she had slept that night, at her grandmother’s or at MaryAnne’s. It came to her—she’d slept at her own house that night, her childhood one. She was hysterical, of course. It was the last time she’d truly ever come undone, and she had refused to go to her grandmother’s. MaryAnne’s mother wasn’t sure what to do, so they drove back to her own house, and MaryAnne lay beside her in Cleo’s twin bed, and Cleo shook from the shock of it, her whole body quaking all night. And then they rose at dawn, and Cleo got into her parents’ bed, which smelled like her mother’s shampoo and her father’s aftershave, and she kept crying, unable to stop even if she’d wanted to.

Eventually MaryAnne’s mother had arrived and packed Cleo a suitcase and delivered her to her grandmother’s, and Cleo wept for three days straight. She stopped eating, and her grandmother fretted, and Georgie, now a responsible adult with a thriving life-coach practice, tried to intervene, but Cleo was also nearly a grown-up by then, and she was strong enough to push them away, to lock herself in her grandmother’s guest room and insist that they let her mourn on her own and fend for herself. It wasn’t a conscious choice back then to spurn their generosity. Cleo was in shock and adrift; her whole world had been their little insular triangle, Mom and Dad and her, and without this formation, Cleo didn’t know who she was. When two sides of a triangle collapse, you’re just left with a solitary straight line. Cleo remembered this now—lying on a bed at her grandmother’s and literally envisioning herself as a flat black line, and she had stared at the ceiling and considered what her parents would want her to do now. To weep, to mourn, or to get the hell up and light the world on fire. And she knew that it was the latter. So she stopped crying and resolved that her tears were a weakness, and she went to the funeral and sat dry-eyed. It was as if she had channeled her grief into stoicism, and from there Cleo channeled this stoicism and her ability to power through straight into her veins.

You get what you get. You do what you have to do. You stop crying. You stop sleeping. You turn yourself into someone to be reckoned with. You become a straight line, and then you become an arrow.