Cleo McDougal Regrets Nothing: A Novel

by Allison Winn Scotch

  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.

  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.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  I am enormously grateful to my agent, Elisabeth Weed, who had the patience to bear with me as I recalibrated and reworked several other manuscripts until Cleo McDougal called out to me, and we both knew that I was finally writing the book I was meant to. Sometimes, like Cleo, I need to take a few side steps to figure out how to point myself forward, and Elisabeth has never once complained about my circuitous route. I’m similarly grateful to Danielle Marshall at Lake Union, who embraced the manuscript without pause or hesitation, proud to put the story of a complicated, powerful woman into the world. Thank you to the entire team at Lake Union for championing Cleo and all that she and I dreamed.

  Tiffany Yates Martin, as always, took my early drafts and worked alongside me to hone them into something even better than I initially envisioned. Kathleen Carter is a wonderful cheerleader and an even better publicist.

  I picked the brains of several DC insiders, who gave me their time and insights, both of which I know are extremely valuable. If any mistakes were made about the heady whirlwind of DC politics, they were my own or intentional—I was aware at all times that Cleo lived in a slightly fictitious bubble, and I tweaked certain elements of her world to reflect this. But I owe a huge debt of gratitude to Philippe Reines, Scott Mulhauser, and Lisa Beaubaire for answering questions both big and small (and possibly annoying—many of my emails or texts did indeed begin with “sorry to be annoying,” an attitude Cleo surely would loathe).

  Thank you to my Twitter friend, BetsyBoo, who came to my rescue by suggesting the amazing Calamity Jane quote after I couldn’t use my initial epigraph by the legendary Leslie Knope.

  I should also note that I grew up in Seattle and have nothing but the fondest of memories from my childhood. Nothing about this story or any of the characters is based on my own life or any of my friends there, who, unlike Cleo, I happily stay in touch with. MaryAnne and Esme and Oliver and Matty and Beth and Maureen and Susan. All of them and every situation and relationship sprung from my own imagination, nothing more.

  I am so grateful to have wonderful parents—I write a lot about less-than-wonderful parents—but mine are examples of parenting done best: supportive, involved, and loving. My mom read this manuscript, as she has all of mine, with a red pencil and an eagle eye and copyedited the hell out of it. I love me a comma, and she put me in my place.

  I have two teens, who deserve a lot of credit for helping me shape Lucas, my favorite character to write. Campbell and Amelia are the delights of my life, and my joy in parenting them is reflected on every page. Thanks to my husband, Adam, for doing so alongside me.

  In the end, I wanted to write a book not about politics but about power, about the state of being a woman in this specific moment in history, about learning to take up space without apology. But I’d be remiss not to thank all the women who spoke their difficult truths these past few years; who stepped forward to seize their moments; who ran for office; who took their swing in 2016, in 2018, and beyond. Thank you all. Cleo McDougal is the better for it. We are all the better for it.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Photo © 2015 Kat Tuohy Photography

  A New York Times bestselling author, Allison Winn Scotch has published Between You and Me, In Twenty Years (a Library Journal Best Books of 2016 selection), The Theory of Opposites, Time of My Life, The Department of Lost and Found, The One That I Want, and The Song Remains the Same. Her novels have been translated into twelve different languages. A freelance writer for many years, Allison has contributed to Brides, Family Circle, Fitness, Glamour, InStyle, Men’s Health, Parents, Redbook, Self, Shape, and Women’s Health. A cum laude graduate of the University of Pennsylvania, where she studied history and marketing, Winn Scotch now lives in Los Angeles, where she enjoys hiking, reading, running, yoga, and the company of her two dogs . . . when she’s not “serving as an Uber service” for her kids. For more about the author, visit www.allisonwinn.com.