“Yeah,” Arianna said. “But it still has two thousand fewer posts than ours does.”

#notallmen had taken flight thanks to Suzanne Sonnenfeld, who had a considerable Twitter following and a cable show in prime time, where she frequently conjured up trouble from nothing. Lucas had once said she probably hid a broom behind her desk so she could fly home, and though Cleo was firmly against the sexist nature of his joke—she’s not a witch, Lucas, she’d snapped, and even if she were, we aren’t against witches, per se!—she really only chastised him out of principle. Not because Suzanne wasn’t possibly a witch—to be clear, she was a horrible, miserable woman. But Cleo would not bring herself to call her a bitch either, because that was even worse. Language matters, she’d yapped at Lucas, whose eyes could not physically have rolled farther back into their sockets. If you want to insult someone, make it smart. Insult her for spreading lies when she knows that they’re not true. That’s where you go for the jugular.

“She’s an irresponsible piece of shit,” Gaby said when they were once again gathered in her office. Cleo didn’t argue because she was figuratively correct about that. Suzanne had been known to incite online mobs and stoke partisan and gender and class and race divides, just for ratings. They’d once been seated at a table together at a fundraiser for ovarian cancer, and in person, Suzanne wasn’t even particularly putrid—she was also a single mom with a son around Lucas’s age, and in that moment Cleo found her perfectly—well, relatively—normal, which made her on-screen persona all the more repugnant. She didn’t even believe in the flames she was stoking, but they’d made her famous and they’d made her rich, so she poured on gasoline and watched the blaze.

“She’s like your friend MaryAnne if MaryAnne had been given a cable show,” Gaby added.

This wasn’t fair, and Cleo said so. “I actually did something bad to MaryAnne—” she started, but Gaby cut her off.

“Don’t admit your full culpability; that’s where they get you. Since when have you gone so soft?”

Cleo started to argue—she wasn’t going soft! But a twinge in her gut did feel guilty over MaryAnne, and she had sent Matty an Alaskan gift basket with a semiflirty note, and she also tried to maul Bowen Babson. So maybe she was suddenly gooier than she realized. Normally she and Gaby were aligned in their steely spines, in their “do not pass go” attitudes.

This new vulnerability could not stand.

“Fine,” Cleo said. “Tell me what to do. I’m listening.”

“Bowen has issued an open invitation to go on his show,” Gaby said over a lunch of pizza delivery for the whole staff. Cleo preferred to order in (or have Arianna do it) when she remembered that it was lunchtime (which was less often than you’d think), because it meant everyone stayed at their desks, maximizing productivity. She knew it was spring and the weather was seductive and some people liked to run to a yoga class, and she didn’t mean to be a sly little hard-ass (she did, though), but if she were going to run for president or even be the most effective senator (last year she’d placed second on the number of sponsored bills signed into law), she had to insist that they stay in.

Admittedly, a few of them were paler than they should be and looking not as healthy as their vibrant twenties and thirties would suggest, but welcome to Washington, friends. Also, since the livestream, their phones, both at the DC and her local New York state offices, had not stopped ringing. It was all hands on deck, even if that meant her staffers didn’t reach their Fitbit step count for the day. Gaby had the team tallying the positive versus negative calls, and right now there was a 73 percent posted on the whiteboard in their common room. That meant that 73 percent of constituents had her back.

“I’m not doing Bowen’s show.” Cleo ripped the crust off her slice and ate that first.

Gaby looked at her with a particular peculiarity. “Did you also sleep with him in New York? On top of everything, God, please tell me you didn’t sleep with him?”

“I thought you were actively encouraging me to get laid.” This was more of a statement than a question, since they both well knew that Gaby was and they both also well knew that if they counted backward to the last time Cleo had headily made out with someone in that rip-your-clothes-off, heat-of-the-moment, can’t-stop-an-oncoming-train type of way, that Kate-Hudson-romantic-comedy-climax kiss, they might never find that moment. Regret.

“I am encouraging that,” Gaby said. “But not with him. Conflict of interest all around. You can see that, right?”

Cleo nodded. She hadn’t seen that, actually, but now, when presented with the notion, she could. Opponents would accuse her of manipulating the press with her diamond vagina, and there’d be an entire movement against her that mostly revolved around slut shaming and, once again, how she slept with a man for the sole purpose of bettering her position. It was the easy blow, the salacious one.

“When will it ever be OK for women to have sex just for sex’s sake?” Cleo asked.

“You can. I did this weekend. A lot.”

Cleo scowled.

“I just mean that it can’t be with someone who has something to offer you,” Gaby said. “It’s not fair. It’s the opposite of fair. But, Clee, we don’t want to give anyone anything to use.”

Cleo sighed. “Well, I’m still not going on his show later. I made plans with Lucas.”

Arianna poked her head through the door. “Senator McDougal? I’m sorry to interrupt—”

“No, you’re not sorry, Arianna; that’s your job. To interrupt me.”

“Right, I’m sorry. But the majority leader’s office just called? He wanted you to stop by.”

Gaby’s chin dropped simultaneously with her eyebrows rising. “Well, that sounds important.”

Arianna continued. “They said he has about ten minutes in about ten minutes.”

Cleo stood, looked around for a napkin. Her desk was just papers and files and more papers and files. She grabbed a spare copy of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer with MaryAnne’s ad from the week before and wiped her hands. Then she slipped her heels back on, reached for her Veronica Kaye lipstick and blush, and pulled her hair into a bun.

“I haven’t forgotten about Bowen,” Gaby called after her. “So I’m putting it in your schedule for tomorrow. Did you hear me? I’m confirming you for tomorrow.”

Cleo had heard her. But tomorrow was another day. She’d triage that situation when the time came. That was one of her specialties.

SEVENTEEN

William Parsons, the majority leader from the great state of Arizona, was sixty-eight years old and had been in the Senate for four consecutive terms. Cleo rushed down the halls of the Russell Building, her heels clacking and echoing. A few reporters lurked around corners, looking bored and scanning their phones, until they eyed Cleo flying through, and then they raised those phones-turned-mics to inquire about Nobells, inquire about the hashtag, inquire whether this whole thing didn’t make her look a little bit unhinged. She stopped only for that one.

“No,” she snapped. “I will not allow you to portray me as crazy for confronting a man who had something to apologize for.” And then she kept on running and arrived outside the heavy wooden doors of his office with one minute to spare. Senator Parsons was known to run an even tighter ship than Cleo: he did not tolerate tardiness, he notoriously hated both grammatical mistakes and even the tiniest of factual errors, and he did not suffer fools. For all these reasons, Cleo generally liked him. He was usually dispassionate, and he was tough, and he held his staff to exceptionally high standards, which meant that stories had circulated for years about his occasional temper tantrums and his frequent use of extremely creative profanity, but Cleo figured that no one came to the Senate for a playdate, so you either put on your big-girl pants or you got a job in lobbying.

Senator Parsons’s office was nearly empty when Cleo arrived. An assistant with a phone pressed to his ear waved her in, then held up a finger. Cleo found it both amusing and terribly rude and presumptuous—that a twenty-three-year-old was beckoning her into the senator’s hallowed space but also indicating that she wasn’t yet allowed to speak.

The aide, Albie, whom she had seen scurrying after Senator Parsons on occasion, finally clunked down the phone, and Cleo was ready for him to apologize in the way Arianna would have. Instead, he said: “The senator is ready for you.” Then he returned to his keyboard and started typing.