“Bravo,” says Bo, reaching over Wallis to give Cricket a high five.

“We underestimated you,” I say to our mother, grinning.

“When can we read it?” Wallis is still bewildered but smiling.

“When it’s done,” Cricket says. We groan and begin to complain but she clucks her tongue. “Respect the artistic process, please.”

“Just give me nicer hair,” I request. “And soften my most strident edges, please.”

“And I’d like to be less of a sad sack,” says Wallis. She cozies further into Bo, and I hear him whisper something into her ear. Whatever he’s said makes her smile.

“If you’re taking entreaties,” says Atlas, “and if I end up appearing at all, could you make me less of a bumbling fool?”

“No promises,” says Cricket. “Now Atlas, where’s that champagne?”

We fill our plastic glasses with bubbly and get a toast in, just before the first firework shoots up over the river, with a pop and a bang and oohs and aahs from the crowd, and explodes into the sky in a perfect patriot’s red dahlia. Right on its tail, a shining white pom-pom flashes forth, then gracefully falls, like branches of a willow tree, glittering tendrils reaching down to marvel those below.

If that ending wasn’t happy enough, I’ll offer a new one.

Women begin to see that our fates are linked more with each other than with the fates of men. As such, we begin to act less in our own self-interest, and more in the interest of all women.

Good guys win. So, naturally, Blake Darley loses his race. Bad guys—exiled to the trash heap of history, their statues taken down, their names taken off buildings. How easy it becomes to differentiate between the two!

The world changes, and so does DC, is what I’m saying.

But you’ve made it this far, so it’s safe to say that you know: this way of the world is not to be, at least not yet.

What will Atlas and I do, then, once the fireworks have ended, once we allow our shoes back on our feet, once we let each other out of arm’s reach? What of Wallis? Of Bo and Cricket? Like my father, someday we’ll all be gone. We’ll have lived and died within an era, within a chapter—a paragraph?—of a history book. We might not know what the pages will say. Or who will write them.

For now, though, we will not worry about what will become of us.

We will ask instead: What will the world become because of us?

Acknowledgments

Melanie Fried took scraps of a story and knitted them into something real. Her enthusiasm and dedication were undiminishing. I’m in awe of her editor’s mind.

Sarah Phair championed this book, and believed in the Richardsons and me from the start. Thanks for letting me hitch my wagon to your star.