“To a youngish woman who is considering running for president? Isn’t that just what people are going to do?”

Cleo thought of Lucas then, and for the first time really did understand why this was excruciating for him. Her past, her sex life, the gossip, the way she went about it without giving him any warning. She had thought she was protecting him by slipping to New York and leaving him to his idyllic soccer pool party, but he wasn’t a child now. She could see why it felt more like a betrayal. She needed to pay better attention to him, she realized, her heart splitting open just a little. She needed to recalibrate her life to ensure that it was in sync with his. If it wasn’t, what was the purpose of this whole thing?

Gaby lost herself for a beat too. “I have to ask: we were friends in law school. Good friends, I thought. Why wouldn’t you tell me? Why did I have to first hear the hints of this from MaryAnne Newman’s op-ed, and I mean, how the hell did she even know?” Gaby looked pained at Cleo’s exclusion, at her silence. Cleo saw it in the wince of her eyes, the hunch of her shoulders.

“I don’t know,” Cleo said. And she really didn’t. In law school it was probably out of shame, first for the affair, then out of the notion that perhaps someone could think she was benefitting from the affair, and then, finally, because of how humiliating it had been when he ended it. In the years since, likely because it was easier to stuff it down and move on. That was how Cleo got through just about everything. “I didn’t tell anyone. Hadn’t told anyone until this weekend. I have no idea about MaryAnne other than she was always an excellent gossip. She would have made a kick-ass reporter, to be honest.”

“You could have told me. I wouldn’t have judged you,” Gaby said.

“It wasn’t about judgment,” Cleo replied, though maybe it was. Women judged other women all the time. Just ask Susan and Maureen and Beth, who had made up their minds about Cleo two decades ago and also how she probably made up her mind about them too. “I was just protecting myself, I guess.”

“I think you were protecting him,” Gaby suggested, rising, ready to get on with their day.

Cleo thought about that for a long time after Gaby left, after she’d drunk the coffee Arianna had brewed, after Gaby returned and said that internals for women were looking even stronger than she anticipated but that the blowback was poised to be formidable too. Cleo thought about how tangled up it can all get, love and ambition and life and sex and doubt and acceptance and loneliness and, yes, regret. And how sometimes, in the mix of all that, you no longer see yourself clearly and instead you start to view yourself through someone else’s lens, for better and also for worse. Cleo was lucky enough to have disentangled herself from Nobells before he convinced her he could mold her into whomever he wished, before he enticed her to believe that he was the reason behind her success, that they were the Pygmalion myth brought to life, with him carving her out of stone, then giving her breath.

But she didn’t regret confronting him. She didn’t regret asking Bowen to livestream it. She didn’t regret burning it all down. If she had to do it all again, she would. Tomorrow.

That was the opposite of regret, she decided. That was living.

SIXTEEN

Arianna was the one who first saw the hashtag, which made sense, since neither Gaby nor Cleo spent anywhere near the same amount of time on social media as she did.

“Oh yeah,” she said the next morning. “I have a search set up for you. You don’t?”

Timothy, one of the four men who worked on her staff and who was theoretically charged with being her deputy communications manager, wandered in and said, “Wait, you don’t have a search on yourself?” Then he wandered out, like he had contributed all that he needed to.

Cleo had looked at Gaby, who was unpeeling an orange and licking the juice off her fingertips. “Do you have a search set up on me?”

Gaby shook her head. “I thought we brought Arianna and Timothy in specifically to do this so I didn’t have to?” She broke off an orange wedge. “If I tracked every mention, I wouldn’t have time for anything else. Not after your little rendezvous to Columbia, that’s for sure.”

Things were still not totally settled between the two of them. They weren’t going to fight about it, Cleo knew, but that didn’t mean that Gaby had altogether let it go—not just that Cleo had ostensibly ruined her weekend with Oliver but that she hadn’t consulted Gaby about the whole thing in the first place. Cleo didn’t blame her. She probably would have nursed the bruise too. She did trust, however, that Gaby would never pen an op-ed about her no matter what, and because of this trust, she gave Gaby the space to be a little pissy and then move on.

“You guys should definitely have a search,” Arianna said, the student becoming the master. “Like, that’s where I see so much good stuff.”

From another office, Timothy echoed: “Yeah, for sure! Searches turn up all the good stuff.”

Cleo didn’t know if “good stuff” meant juicy gossip, and thus not really good stuff, or genuinely good stuff, as in Cleo was a saint. It didn’t matter. Arianna was still talking.

“So, like, I saw this hashtag last night, and I thought it was a one-off, but look, this morning . . . there are hundreds of them.” Arianna jabbed at her phone with the dexterity that only a child who has been raised on an iPhone can. She thrust the screen toward them. “See?”

There, on Twitter, were hundreds of tweets, more coming in by the second.

#pullingaCleo

“What the hell is ‘pulling a Cleo’?” Gaby asked before she sucked on the rind of the orange. Cleo made a face. “What? All of the nutrients are in the rind. I’m training for a marathon.”

“I haven’t forgotten.”

Gaby blew out her breath like Cleo was testing her patience.

“It’s . . . Wait, here.” Arianna swiped and clicked a few more buttons, and then there was a video playing. “See, look? Senator McDougal, you’ve inspired all these women to confront the men who took advantage of them. And they’re filming it, so it’s all captured in real time. Like, there aren’t any take backs.”

“Oh!” Cleo said.

“Oooh,” Gaby said, then reached for her own phone in her back pocket and pulled up the app.

“It’s all over,” Arianna said. “I think this could go seriously viral.”

“It is going seriously viral,” Timothy yelled from a door away.

“Oh!” Cleo said again.

“We do need to be cautious—the backlash, Cleo; we can’t ignore that,” Gaby replied, looking at neither of them, her singular focus on her screen. “I’m making a call.” She placed her phone to her ear and left.

Cleo herself was late for a meeting with Senator Jackman about the free housing bill. Also, she wasn’t sure if she wanted her personal story with Nobells to be trending or not. It was one thing to stride into his office and say her piece; it was another for it to become a nationwide phenomenon, which, if she had thought it through, she should have anticipated. Of course she wanted young women to reclaim their power or not abandon it in the first place, but reclaiming that wasn’t as easy as simply speaking your mind and putting it on camera. Putting it on camera meant exposing your trauma, and that potentially unearthed all sorts of secondary complications. Cleo didn’t want young women to think they had to air their emotional bruises just because she had. And then there was the other fallout, the equally as unsavory blowback: the steady stream of disgusting, misogynistic emails and phone calls that had come into the office all morning. Not to mention the angry missives about the “film first, think later” tactic that Cleo had employed and that her copycats were employing too. Cleo didn’t regret that because it was the only way she could have seen it through. But still, she didn’t want other women to step in shit just because she had.

Cleo checked the time again and, with the phones a nonstop bleat in the background, she grabbed her notes and briefcase. The internet and the hashtag and the furious calls would march on without her, whether or not she stewed over it. She resolved that stewing would give Alexander Nobells the win, and he’d already come out on top far too often. She was a senator, goddammit. She was about to craft the Jackman-McDougal Free Housing Bill that might genuinely change lives for the better. No one, not even her lecherous law school professor, who almost took credit for her worth and simultaneously cost her a job in Big Law, could stop that.

She slid her feet into her dreaded heels and went. Her toes pinched and her calves hated her, but she had to admit that she was standing taller.

By the afternoon, a counter-hashtag had been started. Because of course it had been. A particular set of men was angry that they were being held to account, and a particular set of women was angry on their behalf.