Chapter 1: The Threshold of Departure
Sabrina stopped with her hand on the deadbolt and stared at the text on her screen until the letters swam. Four in the morning, and Duncan wanted her across town like she owed him the drive. Behind her, Diego set his mug down on the counter, loud enough to fill the whole apartment. "It's four a.m.," he said quietly. "Where exactly are you going?" Sabrina didn't turn around. "Out."
"Out where." Diego crossed the linoleum slowly, and the floorboards answered every step. Two days ago she'd come home at five in the morning smelling like somebody else's cigarettes, and he'd swallowed it, because that was the deal, because they were free. "Sabrina. I'm asking you a question."
She pulled a hoodie off the coat rack and something fell off behind it, an old scarf neither of them ever picked up. Her jaw was set the way it went when she'd already decided the conversation ended before it started. The phone in her pocket lit the denim from the inside, one thin blue sliver, and she covered it with her palm.
"Don't do that," he said.
"Do what."
"Stand there with your hand over your phone like I'm your fucking probation officer." He stopped two feet back. Close enough to see the skin around her nails bitten raw. "Go. I'm not stopping you. I just want to know if you're coming back tonight, or if the story's going to be different this time."
"I don't have a story."
"That's not what I asked."
The phone in her pocket buzzed again, and this time she pulled it out, not hiding it, and read whatever Duncan had sent with her face lit blue from below. Diego watched her thumb hover over the keyboard, watched her decide not to answer. "You're not even going to pretend you're coming back," he said, and her silence was the whole answer. He didn't need her to answer. The phone went into her back pocket, screen down, and she lifted her keys off the hook by the door frame. Metal clicked against the deadbolt plate while she worked one shoe on with the heel of the other. The scarf stayed on the floor where it had fallen.
"Second time this week," he said.
"You counting now?" She said it to the door, not to him, and pulled the zipper to her chin. Her breath fogged the small window beside the frame. Down the hall somebody's TV ran infomercials, that sing-song pitch of a man selling knives at three easy payments.
Diego stayed in the doorway with his arms crossed. His mug sat steaming on the counter behind him at an angle, coffee gone cold twenty minutes ago. He'd been up since two. Sleep wasn't something he trusted anymore, not with her moving through the apartment like weather.
Her hand rested on the knob. "You want me to stay," she said, flat, the way she read a label off a bottle.
"No," he said.
That landed. She turned and looked at him for the first time since the text came in, and her mouth did something complicated before it went still. Then she pulled the door open and the cold air slid in around her ankles, carrying the smell of wet asphalt and someone's cigarette from the stairwell.
Diego didn't follow her into the stairwell, but he went to the window and watched the lot until a dark sedan pulled up and she slid into the passenger seat, and the brake lights washed red across the wet pavement. He stood there long after the car turned onto the avenue, one hand flat on the cold glass. Then he went to the counter, poured the mug down the sink, and started washing it. The mug dried upside down on the rack. Diego hung the scarf back on its hook and stood in the kitchen with nothing left in his hands, listening to the building settle. Somewhere above him a toilet ran and stopped. He filled a glass with tap water, drank half, poured the rest out. He picked up his phone twice and set it face down both times.
By six the sky over the lot had gone the color of dishwater. He watched the diner across the street flick its sign on, the OPEN buzzing pink in the rain, and thought about the shift she'd sold him on, how it put her close enough to walk and far enough to have an excuse. He made a pot of coffee he didn't drink and left it burning.
The lock turned at twenty to ten. Sabrina came in with her hood up and her shoes dark with water, phone in her fist, screen dark now. She went past the table without looking at him, toward the bedroom, and her keys landed in the bowl with a clatter that said she intended to leave again.
"Are you going to tell me where you slept?" he asked.
"No."
She shut the bedroom door behind her, quietly, which was worse than a slam.
Diego gave her ten minutes, then knocked twice with two knuckles on the bedroom door. When she didn't answer, he said through the wood that he wasn't asking for a confession, just one honest sentence. The door stayed shut, and he heard her phone buzz against the nightstand inside. He stood there another minute, palm flat against the door, feeling the wood cool under his hand. Through it he could hear the soft click of her phone being picked up, the drag of her thumb across the screen, then nothing. He didn't knock again. He went back to the kitchen and rinsed the glass he hadn't used and set it in the rack beside the mug.
When the bedroom door opened an hour later, Sabrina had changed into the shirt she slept in, an old gray thing with a hole at the collar. Her hair was down and wet at the ends, like she'd splashed water on her face. She crossed to the fridge and stood in the light of it, not taking anything out, just letting the cold spill over her arms.
"The diner wants me on nights starting Friday," she said. "I said yes."
Diego leaned against the counter. "That's a lot of nights."
"It's the shift they gave me."
He watched her close the fridge and sit at the table with her knees up, phone face down under her thigh. She wouldn't look at him, and he knew if he asked, she'd tell him it was nothing, and he'd have to decide whether to believe her.
Diego didn't sit. He switched off the burner under coffee that had been boiling down to tar and said nothing about Friday. Sabrina waited for the argument she'd already loaded, knees up, jaw set. When it didn't come she stood and yawned, and left her phone face up on the table by mistake. Diego stood at the counter with the dish towel still in his hand and looked at the phone. The screen had dimmed but not gone dark, and a notification sat stacked on the lock screen. He could see the top line from where he stood, the sender's name and the first few words, and he made himself read the back of the towel instead.
The building hummed. Somewhere a door opened and closed, and Sabrina's shower kicked on, the pipes knocking twice before the water ran steady. He wiped the counter that was already clean. He put the towel on the rack and picked up his own phone, unlocked it, and set it face down again without opening anything.
Then he looked at hers.
He told himself one look and that was it. He told himself he wasn't going to scroll. His thumb moved before the rest of him caught up, and the lock screen gave way because she'd never put a code on it, and he opened the thread with Duncan and saw the messages stacked like a wall. The last one was a time and an address across town. Under it, a photo she'd sent months ago that he wasn't supposed to see. He scrolled up, which was the thing he swore he wouldn't do, and found the message she'd sent a friend on a night he'd lain awake next to her.
I can't relax at night. Hard to sleep here. Can't really share a bed with him.
He read it twice. The shower still ran. He set the phone back down exactly where she'd left it, screen up, thumbprint smudged across the glass, and went to stand at the window over the wet lot until the water shut off.
Her phone lit up on the table, and the name on the screen was Duncan, ringing loud in the quiet room. Diego stood over it with his hand half-raised and let it ring itself dead. When the voicemail icon appeared, the bathroom door opened behind him. Sabrina stood in the bathroom doorway with a towel wrapped around her hair and steam curling off her shoulders. Her eyes went to the phone on the table, still lit, still showing Duncan's name. Then they went to Diego, standing at the window with his back to her, and something in his posture made her stop walking.
"You answer it?" she asked.
"No."
The voicemail icon blinked once and went dark. She crossed the room in bare feet and picked the phone up, and Diego heard the soft click of her thumb hitting the screen, deleting the notification, or the voicemail, or both. He didn't turn around.
"Who was it," he said, to the window.
"Nobody."
He nodded slowly, like she'd confirmed something he already knew. The rain had stopped outside, and the lot was all reflections now, the diner sign bleeding pink across the puddles.
Diego didn't say anything else. He took his keys off the hook, left without a coat, and walked the wet block to the diner. He sat in a corner booth drinking bottomless coffee until the morning crew changed shifts, and when he came back the phone was gone from the table and so was she. Three nights later it happened again. The lock turned at four in the morning and Diego was already awake, sitting at the kitchen table with the light off, and he heard her keys hit the bowl before he saw her. She came through the entryway with her hood up and her phone in her hand, thumb working the screen, and stopped when she saw him sitting there in the dark.
"You're up," she said.
"Couldn't sleep."
She pulled the phone toward her chest when he looked at it, and the screen threw a pale sliver across her jaw. The message still glowed there, half-typed, a name he couldn't read from this angle. She thumbed it dark and slid the phone into her back pocket, and her eyes went past him toward the bedroom door.
"Sabrina."
"I'm tired." She said it to the floor. Two days ago she'd come in at five and slept in her clothes, and when he'd reached for her in the dark she'd turned her back and let him hold her waist anyway, and he'd spent an hour telling himself that counted as yes.
Diego asked her to turn around and face him, and when she did, he saw nothing behind her eyes that wanted him there. "Do you actually want this, or are you just letting me?" he said. Her mouth opened, closed, and the radiator knocked twice in the wall. She didn't answer. The radiator knocked again and she stepped back from him like the sound had pushed her, hand going to the hem of her shirt and tugging it down over her hips. Diego stayed where he was, letting the question sit between them.
"You asked me to turn around," she said finally. "I turned around. What do you want me to say."
"I want you to say something true."
Her laugh was dry and short. "You want me to tell you I'm wet for you. Is that the true thing you're after."
He almost smiled. He didn't. "I want you to tell me if this is yes or no, and I want you to mean it."
She looked at the floor between their feet, at the seam where the linoleum met the hallway carpet, and she didn't say no. She also didn't say yes. Diego watched her jaw work and her throat move, and he understood that whatever came out next would be a coin flip, and he was done gambling with her body.
"Never mind," he said, and picked his jacket off the back of the chair. "Go to bed. I'll sleep out here."
He lay on the couch listening to her move around in the bedroom, the drawer, the phone ping, the tap of her water glass on the nightstand. Nobody came out. In the morning she was already gone, and the coffee pot was full and cold.
Sabrina made it to the diner with time to spare and took the corner booth where the blinds didn't reach. Her phone lit up twice before she clocked in, Duncan's name both times. She typed back that she couldn't tonight, then deleted it, then typed it again, and the manager called her name before she hit send. She pocketed the phone and clocked in with the apron strings double knotted, and the morning rush swallowed the next three hours whole. The grill hissed and the ticket wheel spun and she carried plates she didn't look at, and every time her hip buzzed against the counter she kept walking. By ten the diner had thinned to two regulars and a man asleep over a crossword, and she finally stood still at the window with a cold mug in her hand.
Across the street, the apartment windows were dark. Third floor, second from the left, the one with the warped screen they'd never fixed. No light behind it, no shape moving past the glass. Diego was either asleep or gone, and she couldn't decide which one she wanted it to be.
Her phone buzzed again. Duncan, three words this time: you free tonight.
She typed no. She held her thumb over the send button and watched the puddles steam off the lot in the new sun. Then she deleted it, dropped the phone in the apron pocket, and asked the cook if he needed anything else before her break.
Sabrina pulled the phone out of her apron pocket and typed No. One letter short of a whole sentence, the cursor still blinking after it like it expected more. She hit send before she could think about it and dropped the phone back in the pocket, and the apron sagged against her hip when she turned from the window.
Duncan didn't answer right away. That was the worst part. For ten minutes she wiped down the counter and refilled the salt shakers, and every time the phone stayed quiet she felt the no sitting in her pocket like something she'd shoplifted. She'd said no to him maybe three times in six months. The last two, he'd asked again a day later like the first answer had never happened.
At eleven she took her break out back by the dumpster where the smokers went. The asphalt steamed and a delivery truck idled at the curb with its hazards on. Her phone buzzed once. Not Duncan. Her sister, asking for money she didn't have. She typed later and put the phone away.
By one the lunch rush hit and the phone stayed in the apron and she didn't touch it once. The cook, a heavy man named Roy who never turned his head unless the wheel spun, called her name twice and both times she was already moving. She carried four plates on two arms without spilling and felt almost good, which was a thing she'd stopped expecting.
She clocked out at three, apron folded on the hook, and walked out into the wet street with her hood up. The apartment windows were lit now. Third floor, the second one from the left, and behind the warped screen a shape moved past and then back. She stood on the curb with a car hissing by behind her and looked up at that window longer than she meant to.
The stairs smelled like someone's dinner, onions and cheap sausage. She let herself in and Diego was at the stove in a clean T-shirt, no hoodie, his beard trimmed close like he did when he wanted to look like he had somewhere to be. He had eggs going in one pan and toast laid out on the board, two plates, two forks.
"You're home early," she said.
"Roy called me. Said you looked like you were running a fever out there." He moved the eggs with the spatula. "You're not sick."
"I'm not sick."
"Then sit down and eat."
She didn't sit right away. She hung the wet hoodie on the back of the chair and it dripped into a little pool on the linoleum, and she watched him plate the eggs like this was a normal Tuesday in a normal house. He set hers in front of the chair she always used. He sat across from it and waited.
Sabrina sat down. She took one bite and then another, and the second one went down easier, and neither of them said anything for a while except the scrape of forks.
"You want to tell me where you were?" he said, eventually. Casually, like a man asking about the weather.
"No."
He nodded and kept eating. That was the thing. He kept eating. He didn't set his fork down or cross his arms or tell her he deserved an answer or that he was only asking because he was worried, all of which she had ready answers for. He just ate and let the plate be a plate.
She couldn't stand it after two minutes. "Are you gonna say something?"
"I said something. You said no. That's the end of it."
"That's not you."
"It's the new me." He said it without a smile. "I'm not going to follow you around this apartment asking questions you don't want to answer. You want to leave at four in the morning, that's your business. You want to come home at ten, that's your business too."
"Since when."
"Since I read something I shouldn't have." He put his fork down. Not angry. Flat, the way he read a number off a bill. "I looked at your phone. You left it on the table and I read your messages, and one of them was about me. About sharing a bed with me. That's on me, not on you. But it told me what I needed to know."
Sabrina's fork stopped halfway up. The kitchen was so quiet she could hear the fridge kick on and hum, and the egg on her fork went cold and pale while she held it.
"You read my messages," she said.
"I did."
She set the fork down on the plate, deliberately, tines flat. Her face did something she didn't want it to do and she looked at the window instead of at him, at the lot and the diner sign and the flat gray sky over both.
"That was private," she said.
"I know.", he said.
"You had no right.", she said.
The Friday night shift was slower than the day, a different kind of work. No lunch rush, no wall of tickets. Just the burners ticking down and the window fogging and the same eleven faces cycling through the booths, truckers and nurses and a man who came in at midnight every night for pie and never spoke.
Sabrina liked it. That was the thing she hadn't expected. She liked the quiet hours, the way the diner emptied down to the hum of the cooler and the sputter of the grill hood, the way nobody needed anything from her after two in the morning except more coffee.
Duncan came in a little after eleven, and he came in the way he did everything, unhurried, like the night had been built around his arrival. He didn't look around for her. He walked to the corner booth by the window, the one where the blinds didn't reach, and sat down like he'd sat there a hundred times, which he hadn't.
She brought him coffee without being asked and he drank it black and told her about a job that had gone sideways, a client who'd wanted a wall moved after the paint had already dried. She laughed. It came out of her before she could weigh it, and it felt strange in her chest, like a muscle she hadn't used.
"You look better than the last time I saw you," he said.
"The last time you saw me I'd been on my feet for thirteen hours."
"That's not what I meant."
She wiped the counter and didn't answer and he didn't press, and that was another thing about him, the way he let a thing sit. He talked about nothing and she listened and the diner stayed empty and the clock over the door moved slow.
She was mid-sentence when she saw him.
Diego. Out in the lot, standing between two parked cars with his hood up and a paper cup going cold in his hand. He wasn't moving toward the door. He was just standing there in the wet, looking in through the window, at her, and at the booth, and at Duncan, who was still talking, still easy, still two words into a story about his brother's boat.
Sabrina's hand stopped on the counter. Duncan kept talking. She heard his voice go on and on and she heard none of it, and the paper cup in Diego's hand tilted a little and he caught it and righted it, and that small motion was the only thing either of them did for a long moment.
"You okay?" Duncan said.
"Give me a sec."
She untied the apron and left it on the counter and Roy didn't look up. She pushed through the door and the cold hit her and the bell over it clanged and Diego watched her cross the lot toward him with her arms crossed over her chest.
She stopped a few feet away. The rain had stopped but the ground was still wet and the diner sign threw pink across his face.
"You brought me coffee," she said.
"Yeah."
"At midnight."
"You said it was a double."
She looked at the cup in his hand. He looked at the window behind her, where Duncan was sliding out of the booth now, dropping bills on the table, putting his jacket on like he'd decided he'd sat there long enough.
Diego held the cup out to her. She took it. Neither of them said anything about who was inside, and nothing needed to be said, and that was worse.
He put his hands in his pockets and looked at the diner sign and then at her and then at the lot.
"I'll see you at home," he said.
He turned and walked back across the wet street, and he didn't look back at the window, and Sabrina stood in the lot with the coffee going warm in her hands and watched him go.
The liquor store on the corner stayed open until eleven. Diego hadn't been inside it in fourteen months, but he knew the shape of it, the way you know a scar you don't look at anymore. Friday he walked the block to the diner for coffee and he stopped in front of the window. Just stopped. The clerk looked up from a magazine behind the register, and the two of them held there for a second, the way two people do when one of them hasn't decided yet. Diego's hand was on the door before he noticed it, which was how he learned his hand had opinions his head hadn't voted on. He pulled it back and walked on and drank the coffee black and told nobody.
Sabrina didn't come home until four. She slid her jacket off in the entryway and a house key she didn't need anymore fell out of the pocket and rang against the floor, and she crouched to pick it up and stayed crouched a moment longer than the task required. She ate a sleeve of crackers standing at the counter with the light off and left the wrapper. She didn't hear him on the couch not sleeping, which was the whole point of the couch.
The month count lived in Diego's head like a stack of plates. When the radiator knocked he counted. When her phone buzzed on the table and he didn't look at it, he counted. On Tuesday he typed his sponsor's number into a message that said, without any lead-in, I need to talk, and he looked at the blue send arrow until the screen dimmed, and then he locked the phone and set it face down. Not tonight. That was a real sentence and he meant it. He meant it the way you mean anything you're going to take back.
Thursday she came in at five with her hood up and went to the bathroom and the shower ran for a long time. Diego stood at the sink afterward, alone, waiting for the tap to warm. The trash can was under the sink and the lid had a warp in it so it never closed right, and that was how he saw the corner of the baggie against the liner — just a corner, just clear plastic, the kind of thing you could call anything you wanted. He looked at it for a while. Then he turned the water on and washed his hands and did not open the lid, and did not know, by the time he dried them, whether he'd decided to leave it alone or decided to pretend he hadn't seen it. There is a difference. He was past caring which one he'd done.
That night he sat on the couch with the TV on mute and no image on the screen worth the light it cost, and he thought about the months in the drawer of his chest like silverware he'd counted so many times the count had become a habit instead of a proof. Somewhere down the hall the bedroom light was on. He didn't go in. He didn't ask. He had stopped asking so thoroughly that he no longer knew where the questions had gone, only that the place they used to be had gotten very quiet.
He found her in the kitchen at the sink, and he didn't plan it, which was the thing he'd promised himself — that if there was ever a next time, it would be planned, talked about, agreed to in daylight with both of them looking at each other. Instead she was standing there with her back to him and her hair wet from the shower, and he came up behind her and put his mouth on the side of her neck, and she said yes.
She said it fast. That was the first thing. He knew her yes the way you know your own handwriting, and this one had no weight on it, came out smooth and level like a word she'd prepared. He should have heard it. He heard it. He kept going.
She turned around and let him lift her onto the counter and she kept her hands on his shoulders, light, the way you rest your hands on a railing. He kissed her and she kissed him back and her mouth was warm and her body gave him everything he asked for, hips, throat, the soft place behind her knee, and none of it was a lie exactly, and none of it was her either. She looked at the ceiling when he pushed inside her, at the water stain they'd never painted over, and she made a sound he'd heard her make before, months ago, in a different life, and he told himself it was the same sound.
She was good at it. That was the worst part, the practiced ease of her, the way she knew exactly what he wanted and did it without him having to ask, and he fucked her against the counter with his hand flat on the cabinet to keep the whole thing from rattling, and she held on, and neither of them said a word the entire time except once, right at the end, when she said his name, and it came out like a question, and he answered it anyway.
Afterward they stood apart. She pulled her shirt down and went to the bathroom and shut the door and the tap ran. He stood in the kitchen with the counter still warm against his hands and the sink dripping and he could not look at the water stain. That was what he'd been doing to her, up against the cabinet, and they both knew it, and he had heard yes and gone anyway, and there was no version of the next two weeks that didn't start right here, with this.
She came out dressed and went to the bedroom without looking at him. He slept on the couch. In the morning there was nothing to say and neither of them tried.
"No, I didn't." He folded his napkin and set it over his plate. "I'm telling you because I don't want to be the guy who reads your phone and then asks you why you're upset. I'd rather say it and let you be angry at me for the right reason."
The radiator ticked. She stood up so fast the chair legs dragged and stuttered on the linoleum, and she took her plate to the sink and ran water over it and didn't wash it, just stood there with the water running over her hands.
"So what now," she said to the sink.
"Now nothing. I'm not going to ask you anything you don't want to answer. Not where you go. Not who with." He stayed in his chair. "I'm just not doing the other thing anymore either."
She turned off the water.
"What other thing."
Diego looked up at her, and for the first time since she'd walked in, he looked tired. "The thing where you let me touch you and I pretend I can't tell you don't want me to." He said it plain. No edge on it. "I'm not doing that."
She stood at the sink with her hands dripping, and Duncan's name wasn't on her phone, and she had said no to him for the first time in a while, and none of it seemed to matter in the face of the way Diego was sitting in that chair. Not hurt. Not begging.
Done.
She left the plate in the sink and walked down the hall to the bedroom and shut the door, and behind it she pulled the phone out and went to her messages, and Duncan's reply was there, sent an hour ago, three words: your loss then.
She read it twice. Then she typed back, and deleted it without sending, and sat on the edge of the bed with the phone dark in her hand, listening to Diego wash both plates in the kitchen like it was any other night.
She sat on the edge of the bed with the phone dark in her hand and listened to the water run in the kitchen. He washed both plates and set them in the rack. The pipes knocked when he shut the tap off. She heard him moving, the drawer, the click of the light switch, and then nothing at all. He didn't knock. She waited for it long enough that the phone went warm in her palm, and then she opened the nightstand drawer and laid it inside, screen down, and closed the drawer with her thumb on the edge so it wouldn't make a sound.
The radiator ticked twice and settled.
In the morning she came out dressed for her shift and he was at the table with his coffee, and he looked up, and she poured herself a glass of water. He asked what time she started. She said eleven. He asked if she wanted a ride, and she said the diner's across the street, Diego. He nodded and went back to his cup, and she put the glass in the sink and left, and that was all of it.
She stopped answering things. Not just him; the phone stayed in her apron pocket and she let Roy's calls ring, let her sister's ring, let Duncan's ring twice before she thumbed them into silence. When she came home she took her shoes off at the door and walked past him to the bedroom, and when he said her name she turned her head halfway and looked at the wall beside his shoulder, which was close enough to an answer.
By the end of the week he'd stopped asking where she went. He did the dishes and she did none of them. He left her coffee going in the mornings, and she drank it sometimes and left the mug wherever the sip had ended. He filled the ice tray and she emptied it. They moved around each other through the kitchen like two people dancing badly to no music, and every night there was less to step around.
On Thursday she came in at four in the morning and he was awake on the couch with his phone on his chest. She expected the questions then. She stood in the hall with her jacket half off, waiting for him to sit up and start, and he didn't. He looked at her once, put the phone face down, and turned onto his side with his back to the room.
That was the night she realized he'd stopped.
The next morning he was at the counter when she came out. He had the mail spread flat, an envelope from the county with her name on it and his address under it, and he'd opened the drawer for the letter knife and left it there.
"You want this?" he asked.
She took the envelope and held it without opening it.
"You should open it," he said.
"I know what it says."
"You don't, though."
She stood there with the envelope and the sun coming in gray off the wet lot, and she wanted to say something, anything, one sentence that would let him know she wasn't doing this on purpose, that her throat had a wall in it she hadn't put there. She did not say it.
"Are you going to say anything?" he said.
"No."
The word came out before she could stop it, and it was the truth, and it was the wrong one. Diego looked at her steadily for a second and then went back to sorting his own mail into piles he wouldn't throw away. He stacked them square. He put the rubber band around them the way he did when he was keeping his hands busy.
She took the envelope into the bedroom and shut the door and put it on the nightstand unopened, and lay down on top of the blanket in her jeans, and did not sleep.
Saturday the diner gave her a double and she took it, and when she got home at nine she went straight to the bathroom and locked the door. She ran the water and sat on the closed lid with the phone in her fist, and Duncan had texted eleven times over two days, and she read every one of them and answered none. She scrolled to the top of the thread and went through it the way you check a stove burner that's already off.
Then his knuckles hit the wood twice.
"Sabrina."
She didn't move.
"You've been in there an hour."
The water drummed in the tub. He said her name again, quieter, and then there was his voice flat against the door, not angry, just close enough that she could hear the grain in it.
"Should I stop asking?"
She put her forehead down on the cold porcelain of the sink basin and looked at the tile between her feet, at the gray grout the grout pen had never fixed, and she made a sound, just breath, and offered him nothing.
"Okay," he said.
His feet moved down the hall. The couch creaked. She sat on the bathroom floor with her back against the tub and her knees up, and the water ran until it went cold, and she didn't turn it off, because turning it off meant going out there. Her phone lit up against her thigh. She unlocked it and typed Diego a message she was sitting six feet from, two words she couldn't say out loud, and then she held her thumb on the backspace until the screen was empty again.
She got up and shut the tap off and sat back down on the tile in the dark.
In the living room the TV flicked on, low, some house-flipping show where people shouted about a light fixture, and she listened to it through the door and knew he'd turned it on for her, so she'd have something to walk out into.
The radiator knocked once and stopped, and she stayed on the floor with her back to the door and her phone in her hands, scrolling to the message thread she'd just emptied to be sure it was gone.
She got up off the tile sometime after eleven and let herself out of the bathroom without flushing the light. The apartment was dark except the blue flicker of the TV, and Diego was asleep on the couch with one forearm over his eyes. She crossed the room barefoot and shut the bedroom door behind her and lay down in her jeans, and the county envelope sat on the nightstand exactly where she had left it, corner lifting in the draft from the window.
She didn't open it. She looked at the shape of it until the room went gray, and then she slept, or something close.
Two days passed like that. He left coffee going in the mornings and she drank it standing up. She worked nights and slept through the middle of the day, and whenever their shifts overlapped they moved around the kitchen without touching, close enough that she could smell the soap on him and the fryer grease on her own hair, and neither of them said anything worth remembering.
Thursday she came off the late shift at half past three and sat in the diner for twenty minutes doing nothing. Roy wiped down the grill and said goodnight and left. The booth window showed her the apartment across the street, third floor, second from the left, one light on in the kitchen.
She counted her tips twice and got the same number both times.
Her phone went off in her apron and it was Duncan, and the text was short. I'm outside.
Sabrina got up and put her jacket on. She slid the phone into her jeans pocket and the screen stayed lit through the denim, a thin band of light down her thigh, and she pushed through the door and walked straight across the wet street without looking at the apartment windows once.
She let herself in and went to the entryway for her other jacket, the heavier one, because the sedan got cold and Duncan never turned the heat up. The deadbolt was frozen the way it got in this weather. She got a hand on it and her knuckles went white around the cold brass.
The kitchen light snapped on behind her.
Diego stood in the doorway with one hand on the frame. He had his T-shirt on and his glasses off and his beard was flattened on one side from the pillow. The light threw his shadow down the linoleum, long and thin, and it reached almost to her shoe. He didn't say anything for a second. He looked at the phone glowing in her pocket and then at the coat already on her arm, and his jaw tightened in a way she had watched a hundred times and never once gotten used to.
"Do you want me to ask where you're going?" he said.
"No."
"Okay." He didn't move out of the doorway. "Are you coming back tonight?"
The phone buzzed against her thigh. She put her palm flat over it, which was a mistake, and she knew it was a mistake while her hand was still moving.
"That's not a yes," he said.
"It's not a no either."
He nodded slowly, the way he did when he was filing something away for later. Outside, a car door shut somewhere down the block, muffled through the glass, and her whole body turned toward the sound before she could stop it.
"Second time this week," he said.
"Monday was different."
"Was it."
She pulled the heavy jacket on and worked the zipper up. The tag had come loose from the collar months ago and the cold metal tab bit into her chin when she pulled it high, and she let it.
"Does he know about your court date?" Diego said.
She stopped zipping.
He said it the same way he'd said everything else in the last two weeks, level, no edge on it, no hands raised, nothing for her to push against. That was the worst trick he'd learned. She had a whole shelf of answers ready for the version of him that shouted.
"He knows what he knows," she said.
"Which is what."
"That's my business."
"Sure." He leaned his shoulder into the doorframe. "I'm not asking for the file."
She turned the deadbolt. The lock gave with a hard click and the cold slid in under the door and ran along the floor to his bare feet, and she saw him feel it and not step back.
"I'm going to the hearing," he said.
Her hand stopped on the knob.
"You don't have to want me there," he said. "I'll sit in the back. But I'm going to be in that room."
"Nobody asked you to."
"I know."
She hated him a little, standing there with his arms loose at his sides and his shadow stretched all the way down the hall, saying the one thing that got under her ribs and leaving no place to put the anger. She wanted him to yell. She wanted the accusation, the phone in her face, the questions about Duncan and the four a.m. and the smell of somebody else's cigarettes. She could have left in the middle of that and felt clean about it.
"You don't get to do this," she said.
"Do what."
"Stand there like you're the good one."
He looked at her for a long second. "I'm not the good one," he said. "I'm just not going to lie about what I'm doing anymore."
The sedan's headlights swept the lot and stopped at the curb, and the horn didn't sound, because Duncan never honked, he just waited. She could see the shape of it out the window beside the door, one brake light dimmer than the other.
Diego took one step back out of the doorway and let the hall open up behind her. He didn't look at the window. He didn't ask who it was. He just waited with his hand on the counter edge, and that was how she knew he already knew, and she hated that too.
"Lock the door behind you," he said. "It sticks."
She stepped out and pulled it shut and stood a second on the landing with the cold biting her ears. Through the wood she heard the deadbolt turn, and the little chain rattle after it, and then his feet move away down the hall.
She went down the stairs fast. The sedan's door swung open before she reached the curb and the heat came spilling out of it, smelling like cologne and something sweet, and Duncan said something easy about the weather and she said yeah, and got in, and shut the door on the cold.
The car pulled off the curb and the lot went dark behind them, the apartment windows sliding past her window, third floor, second from the left. She kept her eyes on her own hands in her lap.
Upstairs, Diego stood at the bedroom window with his shoulder against the frame and watched the brake lights run the red wash across the wet pavement one more time before they went around the corner. When the street was empty he crossed to the nightstand and picked up the county envelope and held it a moment in both hands, the paper thin and cheap under his thumbs.
Then he slid his nail under the flap and opened it.
He read it standing up. He read it twice. The plea hearing was in eleven days, and her name was typed in the box at the top, middle initial included, and there was a number to call if she had questions.
He set it back on the nightstand face up so she would know he'd read it. Then he went out to the kitchen and sat down at the table in the dark, and the coffee pot was still half full from the morning, and he didn't touch it.
He found her in the kitchen at the sink, and he didn't plan it, which was the thing he'd promised himself — that if there was ever a next time, it would be planned, talked about, agreed to in daylight with both of them looking at each other. Instead she was standing there with her back to him and her hair wet from the shower, and he came up behind her and put his mouth on the side of her neck, and she said yes.
She said it fast. That was the first thing. He knew her yes the way you know your own handwriting, and this one had no weight on it, came out smooth and level like a word she'd prepared. He should have heard it. He heard it. He kept going.
She turned around and let him lift her onto the counter and she kept her hands on his shoulders, light, the way you rest your hands on a railing. He kissed her and she kissed him back and her mouth was warm and her body gave him everything he asked for, hips, throat, the soft place behind her knee, and none of it was a lie exactly, and none of it was her either. She looked at the ceiling when he pushed inside her, at the water stain they'd never painted over, and she made a sound he'd heard her make before, months ago, in a different life, and he told himself it was the same sound.
She was good at it. That was the worst part, the practiced ease of her, the way she knew exactly what he wanted and did it without him having to ask, and he fucked her against the counter with his hand flat on the cabinet to keep the whole thing from rattling, and she held on, and neither of them said a word the entire time except once, right at the end, when she said his name, and it came out like a question, and he answered it anyway.
Afterward they stood apart. She pulled her shirt down and went to the bathroom and shut the door and the tap ran. He stood in the kitchen with the counter still warm against his hands and the sink dripping and he could not look at the water stain. That was what he'd been doing to her, up against the cabinet, and they both knew it, and he had heard yes and gone anyway, and there was no version of the next two weeks that didn't start right here, with this.
She came out dressed and went to the bedroom without looking at him. He slept on the couch. In the morning there was nothing to say and neither of them tried.