Cleo McDougal Regrets Nothing - Allison Winn Scotch

ONE

Cleo McDougal is not a good person. She does good, yes, but doing good and being good aren’t the same thing, now, are they?

Cleo McDougal did not see the op-ed or this opening line in said op-ed on the home page of SeattleToday! until approximately seven fifteen a.m., after she had completed her morning at-home boxing class, after she had showered and meticulously applied the day’s makeup (a routine that she admitted was getting lengthier and more discouraging at thirty-seven, but Cleo McDougal had never been one to shy away from a challenge), and after she had roused her fourteen-year-old from his bed, which was likely her day’s hardest ordeal.

Of course, she had not yet seen the op-ed. By the time she did, the political blogs had picked it up and run with it, which was why it took off, blazing around the internet and Twittersphere. (SeattleToday!, a hipster alternative online “paper,” would otherwise really never have landed on Cleo’s radar.)

She had made a rule, which was clearly a mistake—she could see that now—to give herself one hour in the mornings before checking her phone. This was not a hard-and-fast rule, and obviously she scrolled through the news and quickly glanced at her emails while still in bed, before the sun rose over Washington. But it had come to her attention that, well, she needed to be a little more . . . Zen. Voters liked Zen. But they also liked tenacious and prepared and simultaneously calm and confident (and a laundry list of other things—pretty, warm, tough but not too tough, sharp-tongued but not a grandstander . . . you get the idea), and so when Gabrielle, her chief of staff, said that her own therapist advised taking one hour in the morning to unplug so that she absolutely did not completely lose her mind, Cleo thought it might not be a bad idea to test-drive.

It was only day four. She was liking it. She did indeed feel a little calmer, a little more serene, at least until she had to wake Lucas, when the previous hour’s tranquility usually spiraled into a bit of a spat, but she defied anyone to enjoy their morning with a teenager who mostly communicated by grunting.

Surprisingly, Lucas was the one who saw the op-ed first. Perhaps not all that surprising, since he and his phone were nearly telepathically connected, but surprising still because Cleo was, need it be said, a senator, and theoretically her staff should have given her the heads-up on a hit piece published in her childhood hometown, which then took off online like a match to gasoline.

“Who’s MaryAnne Newman?”

Lucas was hunched over the kitchen island in their three-bedroom condo, picking over an Eggo, one of the few things he’d agreeably eat for breakfast, and Cleo wasn’t sure she had heard him correctly. She had never mentioned MaryAnne to Lucas, rarely talked about that time in her life. It wasn’t that she didn’t think of MaryAnne—she did. But she also spent a lot of time trying not to think about her. How can you drive away from your past without even glancing in the rearview mirror? That kind of focus took effort.

“What?” Cleo turned toward Lucas, her coffee perilously close to sloshing over the rim of her mug. (Gabrielle had also recommended that she limit her coffee intake, but that was when Cleo pulled rank and told her she would sooner sleep with William Parsons, the Senate majority leader, who bore a striking resemblance to a walrus, than abandon coffee, and Gaby knew it was not a battle worth pursuing.)

“MaryAnne Newman,” Lucas muttered, which was one step above a grunt, and thus Cleo was almost delighted.

“Are you—are you on Facebook?”

Lucas rolled his eyes, which was much more like him. “No. Have you not seen this?”

He held out his phone, and Cleo stepped closer.

“She wrote about you. And . . . I guess me? I got a news alert.”

“You have a Google alert on me?”

Lucas’s eyes could not have gone farther back into his head. “No. Jesus. It came up on my phone alerts. They do that now, you know, like, send breaking news to your phone.” He shrugged. “I guess everyone who has an iPhone probably got it.” He swallowed. “Also, I’m assuming what she wrote wasn’t true? Or is it? Because then—”

Lucas stared at her, eyelids lowered, an indecipherable mix of teenage disdain and ire and, Cleo detected, something more. Her heart rate accelerated. MaryAnne didn’t even know Lucas; their lives