Cleo was in an exceptionally bad mood by day’s end, even with the promise of dinner with her son, who had been avoiding her since her return and since the rise of the #pullingaCleo hashtag. As of that morning, more than a hundred videos of women confronting their superiors had been filmed and uploaded, and Arianna was squealing that Cleo had started a revolution. Lawsuits were being threatened all over, naturally, by many of the accused—and Cleo wondered if Nobells would dare to try. She supposed that Senator Parsons wasn’t entirely wrong—that by filming first, thinking later, she had gotten out ahead of Nobells’s right to defend himself but, she thought as she stewed at her desk, boo-fucking-hoo. It wasn’t the most prudent political thought, but she had it all the same. Cleo had learned that when dishonest men were faced with the unavoidable truths of their past, they tended to posture and point fingers (often while screaming in quite hysterical tones), but she also still knew that with Nobells, at the very least, she was right. She also recognized that women risked so much by speaking up that false accusations were rarely a reality, and she hoped that if the women were strong enough to face the men who had made them feel powerless in whatever form that took, they were strong enough to endure the threats.

She hated, of course, that women were threatened in the first place. That it was simply understood that if you took your story public, you would endure not just scrutiny but public shaming and terror too. This was the price women paid to speak their truths. Cleo couldn’t change that. She could only speak hers.

And then there were other prices to pay too: getting stripped of the delegation trip, being whispered about in the hallways when you walked by a huddle of men from the other side of the aisle, listening to Suzanne Sonnenfeld suggest that she had your home address and why don’t people show up and protest. Maybe Cleo should have seen all this coming because she was usually quite prescient, but this time she simply hadn’t.

She had hoped Lucas would be proud of her defiance. She didn’t pretend to understand the teenage boy mind—she hadn’t even understood it back as a teenager; just look at how she dumped the very kind, tenderhearted Matty—but still, that was her aspiration. For her son to beam with pride in the way that Arianna had. Even Timothy, her deputy comms director, seemed impressed.

Lucas, however, quite obviously was not. Thus, this morning on their way to school, before Senator Parsons sent her into a rage spiral, she gently asked him if he would skip dinner at Benjamin and Emily’s tonight and if instead she could pick him up after soccer and they could go to their favorite burger joint, PATTIES. It had been their regular thing since they’d moved to DC—mother-son midweek dinners, when Cleo would turn off her phone for the hour and before Lucas had a whole life of his own, and he wasn’t angry with her, and she wasn’t confronting ghosts of her past that made her angry with herself as well. They’d order three different types of fries (curly, sweet potato, and shoestring) and laugh about how Lucas liked mustard on his, which Cleo couldn’t believe and didn’t know where he’d gotten that from. She did, probably she did know—it must have been from his dad, but then, she didn’t know Doug well enough to be sure about that either.

Lucas had begrudgingly agreed to dinner tonight, only after putting up a fight because Emily was making homemade meatballs and he loved them, but Cleo charged her voice with just enough authority to let him know that the invitation wasn’t really a request. Not unlike what Senator Parsons had done today. Lucas huffed “fine” and then put on his noise-canceling headphones that Cleo probably never should have bought him to begin with. Besides, Cleo worried that Emily might start to think she had nearly abandoned him. Also, she really hoped Emily didn’t hold this whole hashtag situation and general public outcry against her, not least because part of the impetus of the whole caper had been her rotten unfaithful husband in the first place.

Lucas was waiting for her outside the soccer field. Cleo had aimed to get there early and watch the last few minutes of practice, but naturally, she was running late. Gaby had exploded into her office as she was packing up to leave and announced with breathless abandon that Veronica Kaye was starting a Pulling A Cleo Legal Defense Fund to help any and all women who wanted to come forward about their own experience.

“A legal defense fund!” she’d screamed. “This is basically an endorsement!”

Then Arianna rushed in behind her, without any apology, and shouted, “Senator McDougal, another woman came forward about Nobells! You did it!”

And Cleo lost her breath a little at that, at the solidarity that comes from establishing a sisterhood, and that maybe Nobells would get what was coming to him, even so many years later. But then she noticed the time, and she threw some files into her briefcase and didn’t even have a chance to celebrate all the news, much less tell Gaby about the Middle East delegation boot, which was maybe for the best, because Gaby might have considered literal murder of the majority leader once she heard. Instead, Cleo raced around them both and out the door, offering general remarks of enthusiasm, certain that if she were late for Lucas, any sort of progress she hoped to make with his overall demeanor and communication through grunting would be lost.

But she was late anyway, and he was the last one to be picked up, so already she was behind in her quest for redemption.

“I’m not feeling well,” Lucas said when he slid into the car. He groaned and curled over. “Can we just go home?”

Cleo noted, unfortunately, that he likely had not used deodorant this morning as he promised but bit back her temptation to comment. She made a note to ask Emily Godwin how she got Benjamin to wear deodorant daily. It didn’t seem like such a herculean ask, and yet here they were.

Lucas had always been an obstinate kid, and Cleo generally had never minded. She herself was obviously headstrong, and she thought it had served her well. You don’t become the youngest congresswoman in government without the ability to brace against a storm. During his toddler days, back when she was rendezvousing with Nobells about twice a week—in his office, at his place when Amy was away, the occasional hotel, but always during the day so she could be back with Lucas each night—well, that was the worst of it. The two of them, mother and son, trapped in an unending cycle of who could be more stubborn. Usually, because Lucas didn’t have the vocabulary that Cleo did, which meant that he screamed and screamed until she worried that someone in their new apartment building would call CPS, he won. He went through one particularly brutal phase when he refused—just refused!—to wear anything but shorts, even in the dead of winter. Cleo didn’t have any mom friends. It wasn’t like there was a gang of student mothers at Columbia Law, and how else was she expected to meet women who were raising young children? She didn’t have time for those weekday music classes where the kids sat around with dirty fingers and smacked bongos; she certainly didn’t have time to work with him on his flexibility or forward roll at gymnastics. They did take a mother-son swim class at the Columbia pool together, but Lucas hated the smell of the chlorinated air, and Cleo hated the very judgmental instructor who couldn’t believe that Lucas, at two, did not want to learn to float, so they stopped going after the second lesson and instead got croissants and cocoa every Saturday morning. That was their moment of peace before he jutted his chin in revolt of whatever else Cleo wanted, and she sighed and sat on her couch and felt in over her head, even when she adored this willful creature more than anything else in the world.

She could have called her sister, but she didn’t. Not because Georgie wouldn’t have helped. Cleo knew that she would have done more than help. She, then well on her way to becoming an A-list therapist, would have sent parenting books and recommended websites and probably shipped some bath oils and organic towels too.