She kept the list, handwritten, in her top desk drawer, which she also locked. She didn’t know why. Lucas wasn’t the type to snoop (if anything, she should be poking around his room), and there wasn’t anyone else in the condo. Maybe it was the symbolism—that it needed to be protected, that it was for her eyes only. That, in senatorial terms, it required clearance. And now Gaby wanted to open it to the world. Ten? Gaby wanted her to pick ten?

Cleo popped the lock and tugged the drawer toward her. She hadn’t reread the list in ages. Her last entry simply read: brownies, but Cleo couldn’t remember if she’d intended to mean that she should eat more brownies (whimsy!) or fewer (gluttony). Cleo remembered her dad encouraging her to use the list as a way to reflect and reset, and she came to think of it more like confession, if she were Catholic (which she was not) and if she went to church (didn’t do that either). She’d convinced herself that if she purged her misdeed on paper, recognized it for what it was—anything from an innocent mistake to an intentional obfuscation—she could pick it up and leave it behind her on the side of the metaphorical road, drive away with a clean conscience.

And to a certain extent, this was true. There were small misgivings on there; she flipped through the top page onto the second, then the third—no high heels (whoever decided that women had to perilously teeter on three-inch pins to make their calves look slimmer while nearly castrating their pinkie toes?) and blinker lights, goddammit, which Cleo remembered she’d jotted down after failing to signal on a turn when she was new to DC and unaccustomed to driving and nearly collided with an oncoming car and instead steered smack into a stop sign.

The notepaper was worn the more she went backward, her handwriting different too. Bouncier when she first started, maybe because she didn’t yet realize how exhausting and difficult adulthood would be. Tougher for her than many because of her parents and her loneliness and probably her ambition too, first nurtured out of love by those parents, then left unwieldy and rambling when Cleo was on her own. So Cleo sank into that drive, gave it space, simply let it take her when it wanted, but it was also true that it made her a little more ruthless, a little less empathetic, a little more likely to sneak onto MaryAnne Newman’s laptop in the computer lab to read her notes while she went to the bathroom to touch up her makeup before they debated in front of their peers to decide who should be elected head of the paper. (Everything in her school in Seattle was a democracy. They really believed the children were the future.) Cleo had always told herself that none of this made her a terrible person; it made her a cunning one, and in fact, it armed her for all that came next: her parents, the pregnancy, Congress. So it was a funny thing to have a list of 233 regrets when Cleo also couldn’t deny that so many of them led her here, today, to everything that had happened since. How could you define regret if it also put you on top? By your motivation? By your failures? By your successes? Cleo didn’t know. Could she see now, from MaryAnne’s perspective, how she hadn’t been so kind in high school? Well, sure. Did that merit MaryAnne’s scorched-earth strategy? Cleo thought not. Firmly not.

For a brief hiccup of a moment, she wondered how long her father’s own list had been. If it had brought him peace, if it had helped guide him. She’d never read it, never asked to read it, and until now had never been curious to do so. People should be allowed their secrets. People should be allowed their scars. Today there was no room for that—there were glaring headlines at every little misstep (case in point: MaryAnne Newman’s now-viral op-ed) or social media frenzies tasting of schadenfreude, but in years past, people like her dad could really step in the figurative horseshit and no one could smell their stink. That would be nice, she thought. Whatever happened to that?

Cleo located her mouse, which was under a pile of confidential files on New York State white-collar crimes, and woke her desktop. She’d never been on Facebook officially, or not personally anyway. Gaby had their comms team handle the social media accounts, which Cleo glanced at once in a while, but she mostly thought her energy was better served elsewhere. She had Twitter because she had to keep up with the news, but Facebook struck her as a little juvenile and also, she didn’t have a huge desire to keep in touch with her high school classmates and see the photos of their grinning family units of four on the beach or their July Fourth parties or, in MaryAnne Newman’s case, her posing with a championship trophy from the round-robin at the country club.

She grabbed her phone. Texted Lucas, who was only down the hall but generally responded best to digital requests.

Cleo: Can u come help me for a sec? She added a smiley-face emoji.

Lucas: No emojis, Mom.

Cleo: Fine. Can u come help for a sec, no emoji?

She heard a rumbling from his room, then the padding of his footsteps down the hall. Her office door swung open.

“What?”

“Remember that time you signed me up for Facebook? Do you remember the login?”

Lucas sighed, exasperated. “You’re not eighty. You should know how to do this.”

“I know,” Cleo conceded. “But I’m busy trying to save the world, so please just log me in.”

Lucas’s eyes rolled so far back that Cleo wondered if they would ever return, but they did, and he leaned over her desk, pounded her keyboard, and voilà!

“Do you want me to add a profile picture? Right now, you look like an anonymous troll. No one can tell it’s you. You made me sign up as Cee Mac. It’s like a bad rap-star name.”

“No!” Cleo pushed his hand off the keyboard. “That’s exactly how I want it.”

“God, you have issues,” Lucas said, but she could tell he was only partially serious, and frankly, to get her teen to rib her was possibly the highlight of her day (though her day admittedly was terrible), so she laughed and replied, “Aren’t you lucky that I’m your mom then.”

He walked out without answering.

MaryAnne Newman’s Facebook page was public, so Cleo had no problem finding not just her profile but her posts and photos and, of course, the op-ed.

I JUST WANTED TO SHARE THIS. IT TOOK A LOT FOR ME TO SPEAK MY TRUTH, BUT A LOT OF US REMEMBER CLEO MCDOUGAL, AND I DO. NOT. THINK. SHE. SHOULD. BE. PRESIDENT.

Cleo nearly giggled because twenty years later, MaryAnne hadn’t changed one bit. True, Cleo had been a type-A perfectionist, tap-dancing not just because it made her parents so happy but because Cleo got off on being the best at everything too, but MaryAnne had been her mirror image—all charged up without quite the dexterity or acumen that Cleo possessed, and so while they were perfect best friends (for a while), this was also the reason they were so combustible. Now Cleo could see that it had never been an equal relationship, unlike Cleo and Gabrielle, who were true sparring partners. There were petty jealousies between MaryAnne and her, and an uneasy sense of competition lurked just under the surface (competition that went both ways, Cleo knew, even if she usually triumphed), but as teens, neither one of them was adept enough to recognize this dynamic. They loved each other, they really did, even when they didn’t. And maybe Cleo should have just let things take their natural course. She probably would have bested MaryAnne in debate and on the school paper; she didn’t have to cheat, to take shortcuts. But part of her—the regretful part—wanted to win more than she wanted to protect her friendship.

Cleo stared at MaryAnne’s Facebook profile picture and remembered how, for that internship their junior-year summer, just before her parents died, she gave MaryAnne bad advice on her essay, knowing full well that writing about the day her dog died was trite and clichéd and would never win her a spot in the mayor’s office. Just prior, MaryAnne had casually bragged that her parents were golfing partners with the mayor’s personal lawyer and that he was going to put in a good word for her. Cleo, feeling undermined and yes, a little less than, could not let that stand. She herself wrote about her relationship with her sister, how she felt like two people—one an only child and one a much younger sibling of a troubled sibling who had dropped out of college—she did not mention her arrest for weed possession—and the expectations this placed on Cleo, the good one, the best daughter they could have asked for. Cleo got the internship. MaryAnne did not.