Cleo rolled to a stop at the light. She knew as well as anyone that affairs happened. And yet even after MaryAnne’s op-ed, she hadn’t told Gaby about Nobells, about that second year in law school. She’d never told anyone, actually. Shame, embarrassment, regret—that’s probably what kept her quiet. Culpability too. She’d gotten out of it with little fallout, which should have relieved her. She hadn’t destroyed his family; she hadn’t destroyed her reputation entirely, which even in law school was as a superstar.
She hiccupped, wondering how much she should share now, with her best friend, who wouldn’t judge her. The light changed, and Cleo pressed the gas too quickly, her tires squealing below, as if she could outrace her past, as if it weren’t right on her tail, breathing down her neck.
ELEVEN
If Cleo had just chosen from her list at random as Gaby had suggested, this regret never would have seen the light of day. There was MaryAnne shameful, all done in the name of ambition, and then there was this sort of shameful, which, even thirteen years later, still made her sick with disgust. If she hadn’t seen Jonathan at the Human Rights Campaign dinner, she would have kept it stuffed down, where she preferred it to be. But there it was, a blight smack in the middle of the pages of her yellow pad, folded in between NEVER talk back to Owens (a formidable torts professor who annihilated Cleo in an open argument on product liability) and lay off bourbon, which, all these years later, Cleo had little memory of the why behind it but also couldn’t ever remember drinking bourbon as of late, so it must have been something. She had a vague recollection of an evening out with Gaby in law school and of . . . dancing? She shook her head. It couldn’t be dancing. Cleo McDougal did not dance in public, which she realized, now, might soon change.
There it was, one word, on page four of the yellow pad, and she understood its meaning: NOBELLS. Thirteen years ago, she had double underlined it, as if not just a regret but a warning too.
Cleo leaned back in her office chair and exhaled, her whole body slumping. She really didn’t want to face this reckoning, but the more she thought of poor Emily Godwin, who never failed to cover Cleo’s orange-slice duty and picked up an extra rotisserie chicken from Costco, the more convinced she became that if she were serious about addressing these regrets—if she didn’t just want to use it as a stunt to propel her toward Veronica Kaye’s checkbook (a differentiation of which Cleo was not yet sure)—she had to face Alexander Nobells. MaryAnne Newman hadn’t been wrong about everything in her op-ed.
As a second-year law student and young mother, Cleo had perfected the art of juggling fine china. Metaphorically, of course. She wouldn’t have had time to learn to juggle, even if that had been in the course catalog. (If it had been a requirement in the course catalog, she would have found the time.) Professor Nobells, who ran the Advanced Evidence seminar, had a reputation for being jovial but tough, and Cleo liked him immediately. He wore speckled sweaters with cowl collars and black-framed glasses that were both retro and modern, and sometimes Cleo would watch him, rather than listen to him (an anomaly for her for sure), and think that if life had put him on another track, maybe if he had been less intelligent or less passionate, he could have been an L.L.Bean model. As it was, he was maybe forty or so and looked like a man who had grown into his looks.
He was a partner at the law firm (the best in the city) where she worked the summer between her first and second years and had a reputation for taking an interest in his students’ lives, so Cleo thought nothing of it when he stopped her on her way out of his seminar to ask about Lucas. She hadn’t publicly shared that she was a single mom, but Columbia was small enough that she assumed people knew, and like it or not, she was asked about it when she interviewed for the summer position. (She had repeatedly assured them that she had excellent childcare lined up, which she did. She also wondered if they’d ever ask a single dad such questions and, furthermore, knew that these questions weren’t ethical, but she didn’t want to jeopardize her job prospects by pointing this out.) She tried her best to show up to class in nonwrinkled, nonrumpled clothing and with her hair brushed and cheeks blushed, but she knew this wasn’t a battle she always won. But what she lacked in style, she made up for in preparedness, which was all that mattered to her in the end. She’d thrived at her summer position at his firm and made Law Review her first year. She didn’t give one shit if Lucas’s oatmeal ran down the front of her T-shirt if she could out-debate, out-work, and out-gun her peers.
Professor Nobells, whom she had known only by name over the previous summer, seemed to take sympathy on her that day when he stopped her in the doorframe as she left Advanced Evidence. She knew he was married. He often spun his gold band around his finger as he paced on the dais, and sometimes he’d tell adorable anecdotes about his kids, who were a few years older than Lucas (who was just eighteen months or so—Cleo remembered he’d just learned to say two-word sentences when this all started happening).
Still, when he said, “Miss McDougal, do you have a moment,” she turned back toward him, not really having a free moment because she was due to get Lucas from day care, and she didn’t like to be late because she spent large swaths of her afternoon looking forward to sweeping him up in a bear hug. But she wasn’t the type to brush off her professors, so she said, “Of course. Is everything OK?”
His eyes fanned into a smile. “I just wanted to check on you. I know you’re pulling double duty. And your work is immaculate, so it’s not that.”
She waited for more, her breath in her throat. In law school, though she knew she was good, she still had a small but niggling perpetual worry that she wasn’t as good as she thought. In Seattle, she’d been a superstar because her competition wasn’t as stiff. At Northwestern, she’d made dean’s list because her academics had been her sole focus. (Barring the very occasional night out and even more occasional drunken night out, which resulted in Lucas.) But at Columbia, she knew her attention wasn’t what it should be. Of course it wasn’t! She had a toddler, for God’s sake, and because it was just the two of them, Lucas had to come first.
“Relax,” Professor Nobells said. He reached out and squeezed her shoulder, letting his hand linger, then slide down her arm. “I’m not here to tell you you’re doing anything wrong.”
Cleo exhaled and wondered if she should find it strange that her professor was touching her, but she also noticed that she didn’t mind. It came from a good place, a welcoming place, and Cleo, rather than recoiling, liked it. A decade later, at her desk in her home office, she considered that maybe she liked it just because she hadn’t been touched by anything other than tiny hands in so long.
“Oh,” she said. “I’m fine. Tired a lot. But fine.” She almost told him about how Lucas was teething and she wasn’t sleeping because it was easier just to sleep on his floor rather than trudge back and forth from her room, but she didn’t want to look unprofessional. She didn’t want to look like a harried mother, which she knew would relegate her to the dismissed pile. Motherhood, regardless of how fiercely she loved her son, wasn’t going to handicap her. She had resolved this from the moment the plus sign appeared on her pregnancy test.