“He has the right to be very upset with me,” Cleo said to Lucas as they were getting ready for bed. “All I can do is try.”

Despite her script, Cleo fumbled for words, which she’d suspected would happen, which was the point of the script in the first place. The waitress brought her the cashew milk latte, and it left a weird film on her tongue, so she grimaced and tried to just jump in. It occurred to her that perhaps Doug had seen photos of Lucas online—from time to time, he was photographed with her, though she tried her best to keep him out of the fray, and the press was usually respectful. (And surprisingly had taken her at her word early on that she had full custody, and it was the dad’s decision.) She didn’t think there were many recent public pictures, though, and Lucas had changed so much in the past few years, and besides, what are the chances that you see a child of a woman you once slept with and make the leap that he’s yours? Cleo could feel herself spiraling now, and she told herself to say it, just fucking say it! she screamed inside her brain.

She met Doug’s eyes, and then she watched his gaze drift over her shoulder. Something changed about his demeanor, like when an animal goes into fight-or-flight. His already good posture straightened up even more; the lines on his forehead folded. He returned to Cleo’s eyes and then back again, and Cleo knew, even before she swiveled around, that she never should have trusted a teenage kid to follow his mother’s instructions.

Lucas was standing by the hostess’s table, staring at Doug, looking more vulnerable and terrified than Cleo had ever seen. And she didn’t mean to and she didn’t fucking know what was happening with her, but she felt the swell of tears rush forward, and there was nothing she could goddamn do to stop them. She knew that Doug knew, because how could he not? Seeing the two of them together was like slipping back in time or, for Doug, like looking in the mirror at his younger self.

“I don’t . . . ,” he started, and Cleo watched his face go slack and then turn a very deep shade of red, which she prayed wasn’t rage.

Cleo stood, wiped her damp cheeks, and walked to Lucas, pulling him tight. She grabbed his hand and squeezed. She had to absorb his terror; it was the very least she could do and also the most she could do. This was what parenting was.

“Come on,” she whispered. “We can do this.”

Doug rose, then sat again, his face moving from Cleo to Lucas to Cleo to Lucas. Cleo reached for a chair from the abutting table and slid it across the floor and offered Lucas her seat, then sat in between them.

“I didn’t email you about cybersecurity,” Cleo said. She tried to draw on the confidence she used whenever she made a public speech. It didn’t work as well as she hoped, but at least she had stopped crying, though her voice still shook. She blew out her breath, tried to steady herself, and Lucas, the love of her life, now reached for her hand too. “I emailed you about Lucas.”

In her script, she had followed this with some line like He’s your son or He’s our son, but she knew that she didn’t need to. Doug’s stunned silence conveyed everything she needed to know.

“I left Northwestern and didn’t tell you,” Cleo said. “Obviously. And you can hate me, and you may, and I can live with that. But please, I hope you won’t hate him. And I composed a whole script to justify what I did, but there really isn’t any excuse.”

Lucas glanced toward his mom then, their hands intertwined and his eyes wet, and she said, “How you could ever think you were a regret—” Her nose stung, and her chin quivered again. “You’re the best accomplishment of my life. And I’m sorry that I have made a mess of this for you.” She looked at Doug now. “For both of you. I’m sorry.”

Doug really didn’t know how to react, which was both reasonable and justified. But he asked Cleo to give him some time alone with Lucas so they could talk, and though her instinct was to stay and protect her son, she realized that maybe her instinct was to stay to protect herself. Lucas was now the age where he could see how deeply flawed she was, and she couldn’t shield either of them from the mistakes she made and the ripple effects that she passed on.

“I’ll text you when we’re done,” Lucas said, and Doug looked at him, bewildered, as if he couldn’t believe he had a teen who could text his mother and also had the fortitude to sit in a café and drink a cashew latte with the man he just learned was his father. Doug probably couldn’t believe it, actually. If he had, Cleo might have been more alarmed.

She tried to calm herself by walking around her old neighborhood, where she and MaryAnne used to roam after school. She peered into shop windows and occasionally wandered in. She turned a corner and found a store devoted exclusively to mirrors, which she thought was a little niche, but she was no longer this area’s target market, so what did she know?

She stepped inside and squinted: the light from the sun outside was bouncing off the dozens and dozens of mirrors—the brass-framed ones, the antique warped ones, the bold floor-to-ceiling ones. She was inclined to slip on her sunglasses but reconsidered; she thought she’d be missing the point.

“Let me know if you want something,” a disinterested twentysomething with dyed black hair and too much eyeliner said without looking up from her phone.

Cleo peered closer at herself in a giant mirror in the shape of a star. She had lines around her eyes now, and she was going to have to do something about the stray gray hair or two before they launched the campaign. Women couldn’t be perceived as old, she knew. Through the mirror in front of her, she saw her reflection all around the store, from every unflattering angle, and from the well-lit good-looking ones too.

She straightened up and checked her phone for a text from Lucas. There wasn’t one.

She thanked the cashier and tugged the door open and stepped back onto the sidewalk into the Seattle sun. She resolved right then, in her hometown, on her old stomping grounds, that she wasn’t going to dye those gray hairs after all. Through everything, her parents, her pregnancy, Alexander Nobells, Congress, all of it, she’d earned them.

Fuck that, she thought without any sense of apology, without any hint of regret at all. I’m going to show up just as I am.

TWENTY-NINE

Doug, though extremely upset with Cleo, took none of this out on Lucas. So Cleo was correct in remembering that he was a nice guy. And in fact, he had a story of his own. After moving to Seattle postcollege for the tech scene, he also discovered the thriving gay scene and further discovered that there was a reason he had to be eight beers in to sleep with Cleo and anyone else of the female persuasion. And thus was now happily married to a man named Bradley, who was a private chef. They had two beagles but no children, though they were considering it. They played for an amateur soccer team on Saturdays, which explained a lot about Lucas’s golden foot.

Lucas told Cleo all this once he finally texted her about an hour and a half later.

Doug invited Lucas to dinner that night but did not extend the same invitation to Cleo, and she thought this was quite fair. She insisted on accompanying him to their house, though, and Bradley shook her hand and said, “Well, this is certainly strange, a senator and two gays and a surprise teenage son,” and she liked him immediately, even though he closed the door on her shortly thereafter.

She found a wine bar that served tapas in the neighborhood and asked for a table for one.

“Just you?” the host asked.

“Just me,” she said. And then she sat at her table and texted Georgie and texted Gaby and also texted Emily Godwin, who had left her a voicemail earlier (which Cleo listened to) when she’d heard about the trip from Benjamin. And she knew it wasn’t just her after all.

They were on a flight out the next morning, but Cleo rose before the sun and made her way down to the Seattle waterfront, just as she had those few weeks ago. She knew she would never be a painter, much less a dancer like her mother, never see the world like she did, likely never take the time to appreciate its vivid colors and landscapes and detail and the beauty of a perfect grand jeté. She leaned over the concrete guardrail in Waterfront Park and stared at the drop below into the dark water. Then she righted herself and stayed there until the sun came up.

It was remarkable, she thought before she turned and headed back to the hotel to retrieve Lucas and go home: how the whole world could look different just by shifting your perspective. How over the course of just a few minutes or even a few weeks, everything could become a little brighter, a little clearer, but only if you opened yourself up and allowed for it.

Bowen finally returned her email while she was on the plane home. Cleo had to laugh because he was so fucking smooth that he knew to time his reply to when she had finally quelled one fire and before she started another with the campaign kickoff.