He accepted her invitation for a drink, though he insisted it would be his treat.

She wrote him back that they could split it. And she started to explain why—because they were equals and she didn’t need him to take care of her and it was the day and age when women should pay for men too!—but Lucas looked over and read the email and said: “Oh my God, Mom, give it a rest. Not everything needs to be spelled out.”

So she deleted those sentences and clicked a smiley emoji and a thumbs-up, which also made Lucas groan, but she didn’t care and hit Send.

“No regrets,” she said to Lucas.

And he rolled his eyes and returned to his own phone, but then he glanced up and smiled and said, “Ha ha.”

And Cleo took this as a victory.

Cleo had vowed to burn the list once she returned home. Georgie had offered to stay on FaceTime while she did it, but Cleo waved her off.

She didn’t know what was stopping her. It was just sheets of paper, just notations of a past that she now had control over. And yet, after she said good night to Lucas and reminded him four times to brush his teeth, she wandered to her office, where the list was resting on her desk, no longer locked away, and she found that she simply could not.

She understood the symbolism of why she should. Georgie had made a compelling case about turning your regrets into ashes and blowing them into the wind, but when it came time to find a lighter and turn it into flames, she instead folded the list neatly three times, found a padded envelope, and sealed it shut. Her list would end with 233 items, and if she screwed up in the future, which she would, she’d have to figure out how to move forward without relegating it to a sheet of paper and hoping that would absolve her.

Burning it wouldn’t have changed anything. Or maybe that was just an excuse. Her mother’s painting hung in the hallway outside her office, but this was what she had left of her dad. The list, for all its complications, had made her feel less alone for so long, she realized. It tied her to her father, whom she never had said goodbye to—she’d been at MaryAnne’s when they set out for their anniversary trip.

Maybe in the future, she’d burn it.

For now, she dropped it in her top drawer, where it had sat since she moved to Washington as a young congresswoman with her five-year-old son, and she turned off the lights to her office and went to find herself something to eat. Cleo had thought ahead and thawed some of Emily Godwin’s casserole from her freezer.

Her Senate office was a beehive on Tuesday. Veronica came for a sit-down, and she smelled as lovely as ever, and Cleo and Gaby were anxious but not nervous because it felt like with the three of them collectively, they were going to be invincible. At the news of her likely candidacy announcement, several of the men who had already declared their own quest for the office started making statements about her likability and her fitness and, of course, her stamina, but Cleo knew that if they wanted to come for her, they were going to have to come with more than that.

“Stamina?” Gaby had shouted self-righteously but also sarcastically. “Please! Three of these guys are nearly eighty! If they want to have a fight about stamina, let’s get in the ring.”

Cleo sat behind her desk and envisioned jumping into a boxing ring with the former governor of Minnesota, who was indeed seventy-eight and had been credibly accused of pinching his staffers’ asses yet still had the gall to run for president, and while she didn’t want to be responsible for knocking him unconscious, she also admitted that she wouldn’t have minded either. As it was, Senator William Parsons’s chief of staff was nervy enough to call Gaby and ask if he couldn’t be in the running for the VP nod. Gaby hung up on him.

“We’re not going to punch back,” Veronica said. “This isn’t going to be a campaign of tit for tat.”

Cleo placed her elbows on her desk and dropped her chin into her palms. “You don’t think we need to counter them?” she asked.

“No,” Veronica said with the authority of a woman who knew things. “This isn’t going to be about stooping to their level. This is going to be about them chasing you as you rise above.”

“I like that,” Cleo said.

“It’s genius,” Gaby echoed.

Cleo’s phone buzzed, and there was a text from Bowen. He had an unexpectedly free evening; could she meet for that drink tonight? Cleo had planned to spend the evening catching up on work because Lucas was going to a movie with Marley. But one drink, maybe two? Perhaps it might slide into three? Cleo grinned as she thought of it.

Then she typed in a simple answer: yes.

She dropped her phone into her top drawer.

“Everything OK?” Gaby asked.

“Perfect,” Cleo replied.

And then they raised their pens and put their heads down and got busy writing their future, which was much more gratifying than writing a list about their past. And as their staff came and went with ideas and statistics and polling, they stayed that way all day, the three of them, because no one was going to do the work if they didn’t do it for themselves. So they did. And they would. And already they knew they were changing the world, step by step, without apology. Exactly as it should be.

Only forward. No regrets.