Lucas was still grouchy on Sunday, and Cleo gave him his space. She went for a run and put her phone on Do Not Disturb so she wasn’t inundated with the updates from the overnight news slog, which saw the YouTube video crowding out the regrets list headline, which was still slightly overshadowed by the #pullingaCleo hashtag. She was happy to read, however, that both lawsuits from the hashtag confrontations had already been dismissed when the men were faced with evidence their victims made public. Women weren’t willing to take this shit lying down anymore, and Cleo sprinted up a hill in her neighborhood and pumped a fist just because. She typed out a quick text to Gaby—she had longer thoughts that needed to be unpacked between them—but at the very least, they should celebrate this. That two young women had spoken up. That they had been heard. That two older men were being held to account.

Then she turned off her phone entirely, because she knew that thrusting herself into the presidential conversation meant a thorough examination of her life, but she also knew that like most things, this would all pass. Maybe not all of it. She could already see how the conversation about her regrets was being framed in some outlets: “Can We Trust a Woman with So Much Baggage?” and “How Many People Does Cleo McDougal Owe Apologies To?” and so on and so on.

She ran through her local streets with her hat pulled low and resolved that she did owe apologies to a few people—like Lucas, like MaryAnne, and like Doug Smith, whom she should have tracked down on campus because he deserved to be part of Lucas’s story, but at the time Cleo, fairly or not, had been so let down by everyone she’d come to count on—her parents were dead, her sister was absent, her high school boyfriend too smothering, her best friend, well, that was Cleo’s own doing—but as Cleo saw it at the time, she was her own best shot. It wasn’t how she would do it now, and she didn’t want to excuse it, but then, that’s what regrets were, after all. How you looked back and realized how different it should have been.

She felt a cramp building and slowed her pace. And then the idea came to her all at once, though it had probably been twenty years in the making. That’s how easy and how hard it was to ask for help.

She scrolled to his number in her contacts, where she’d located his address not too long ago to send that salmon from Alaska. She shook her head and smiled, looking at how he typed it in back in the Sheraton bar: MATTY!

It was early in Seattle. Not yet eight. But she remembered that, like her, he’d always been a morning person, and so she took a chance.

He answered it on the second ring and sounded like he was inside a wind tunnel.

“Am I catching you at a bad time?” Cleo shouted.

“One second, hang on!” he shouted back. He adjusted something on his end, and then the line was quiet. “Sorry,” he said. “I’m on my bike. Training for a triathlon.”

Cleo grinned at the notion of her geeky high school boyfriend morphing into a triathlete but then realized that anyone could be anything if they worked to redefine themselves, and maybe with this call, Cleo was aiming to redefine herself too.

“I’ve been meaning to call you,” he said. “That salmon! Best I’ve had in my life. Think I’m going to book a cruise up there, just to see if I can catch some for myself.”

Cleo grinned wider now, at the ease between them, at how happy she was to be able to pick up the phone and connect with her past.

“Listen, I was hoping I could ask a favor,” she said. “I mean, if you wouldn’t mind, I could use a little help.”

Matty laughed for what felt like a minute. Cleo imagined him pulling over on the side of the deserted road to get a hold of himself. “Are you kidding me, Cleo? I think this is probably the first time in the history of Senator McDougal’s life that she has asked someone for help. I’m fucking honored. Tell me what I can do. I’m ready.”

Matty said it would take a couple of days. He thought they had some data searches that he could run internally to track down the generically named Doug Smith.

“I’d think you’d have better access through the government,” he said. “Don’t you have big intimidating databases that can do things like this? Like, not only find Doug Smith but tell you his last eighteen purchases and what he’s craving for dinner and what side of the bed he sleeps on?”

“We do,” Cleo said. “But this one is personal. And for once in my life, my job has nothing to do with it. And I’d prefer to keep it that way.”

Matty whistled his approval. “I guess people can change.”

“I’m not changing, Matty. I’m improving. There’s a difference.”

He laughed again and said, “Goddamn it, you are such a fucking politician. I can’t believe I ever thought we could make it.”

And Cleo laughed too, because, to paraphrase her chief of staff, both of those things were true at once.

Cleo knew she needed to deal with Gaby, who had texted her back asking if they could talk about how the list got out, but she didn’t know how or what to say yet. Georgie, who was heading home on the latest flight out Sunday night, suggested honesty.

“It seems to me,” she said, “that other than Lucas, she is the foundational relationship in your life. She’s been your family, and you should treat her accordingly.”

“But I’ve been terrible with family!” Cleo pointed out.

“But not anymore,” Georgie said, her bangles jangling and her tunic flowing, as she folded her clothes into her suitcase. “Not anymore.”

Gaby was waiting for her in her office on Monday morning with a latte and a breakfast burrito.

“I wanted to offer sustenance,” she said, her hands thrust forward like a peace offering, her tone suggesting the same.

But Cleo had already eaten. Lucas was out of school for the week to recover from the surgery—and she’d lured him out of bed and sat with him at the breakfast table, and they shared a plate of scrambled eggs with cheese. Cleo couldn’t remember the last time they’d done that, and she ruffled his hair on her way out, and he mildly grunted his annoyance, and then she told him not to watch Netflix all day, but he said he made no promises in an extremely irritated voice.

“Did you find him?” he asked.

And Cleo told him the truth, unlike too often in the past: “I’m trying.”

He nodded and returned to his screen. So things were like they were before, but different too.

Cleo slid back her chair and shook her head at Gaby’s breakfast offering. Her stomach was flaring with nerves as it was. She didn’t want to believe that Gaby had released her list, and she’d promised Georgie honesty—and she knew it was the only way through, but still, even with Cleo’s newfound emotional growth, none of it came easily. “I ate already.”

“Oh, OK.” Gaby’s face fell. She delicately set the latte and burrito on Cleo’s desk, as if they were fragile, as if, in fact, they were their friendship.

Cleo folded her arms and stared at her best friend and her chief of staff and a woman whom she had admired for as long as she’d known her.

“I want to believe the best, I do, but I think you owe me an explanation,” she said.

“I promise, I didn’t say a word to the press,” Gaby said. “I swear on anything that matters to us. It wasn’t me. I called . . . Didn’t you listen to my voicemails?”

They both knew that Cleo never listened to voicemails. If you wanted to reach her, you put it in writing or you went through her staff. Cleo supposed now that this was one more thing about herself that she would have to revisit. Listen to your goddamn voicemails! She thought that this was something she could do. But perhaps she hadn’t wanted to listen to Gaby’s. That was the more truthful answer here. She hadn’t been ready to hear that Gaby had betrayed her. Because then what?

“Gaby, you were the only person who knew. Do you know how vulnerable I felt? To see my private life all over the news? Do you know what it did to Lucas?”

Gaby’s brow furrowed. “What does your list have to do with Lucas?”

Cleo stared, and something passed between them, as it can between best friends, and Gaby understood.

“Shit. Oh shit. Cleo . . .”

Cleo exhaled. She didn’t want to detonate everything like she had with MaryAnne. She thought of their confrontation in Seattle at the country club, and for the first time, Cleo truly understood what MaryAnne felt—the sting of the betrayal—and what she needed—the acknowledgment that circumstance had trumped friendship and an honest, gut-sucking apology. Why had that been so difficult for Cleo to provide?