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| 1 |
Mabel spilled half her egregiously expensive latte on the sidewalk and was trying hard not to cry over it.
Her mom always said spills were accidental art and that was probably why Mabel held onto every pair of paint-splattered jeans and spaghetti-sauced white t-shirt. She couldn’t exactly excavate an entire sidewalk slab and frame it on her aunt’s wall—On Loss and Latte Foam, Mora (2022)—but she did pull up her camera app and snapped a picture with a black and white filter. Piss or coffee, it would be anyone’s guess now.
Man, what a long year, and New York had only just sent the miserable summer packing.
Out of nowhere, a set of gentle knuckles brushed against her shoulder. Not an old lady’s pardon me dear brush, oh no. A full-on, let’s strike up a conversation, you and me, kid brush of the shoulder. So, of course Mabel did what any other self-respecting New Yorker would do—whirled around brandishing the rest of her piping hot coffee as a weapon of handsy-asshole destruction.
Theo, hands equally full with styrofoam, backed off immediately. He winced and spread his arms in as much a t-pose as he could manage. The gesture seemed to say, sorry, didn’t mean to scare you.
“It’s okay. I was just”—she waved her lidless cup, then motioned at where it got her—“making street art.”
By his puzzled face, she knew he either didn’t read half her words or didn’t understand them. She wasn’t sure she understood them herself.
Someone, who thought they were busier and more important than her, shouldered by and sent another wave of her latte to the ground. “Well, that makes sense,” she muttered and shucked the rest into the nearest trashcan. Stupid hipster coffee shops and their refusal to stock lids because they read an article once about how they killed baby orcas.
A coffee—with a lid—appeared right in front of her face. Here, Theo’s gesture telegraphed loud and clear.
“No, I can’t. It’s for…” Mabel trailed off, because she didn’t know who Theo had bought a second coffee for. She wasn’t even sure what he was doing in her neck of the city.
Theo handed the coffee off to her anyway and took out his phone, typing something rapidly, one-handed. It was for my dad, the text in his notes app read, I’d rather you have it.
As a middle finger to Teddy Dimas, Mabel took an immediate sip. The coffee was black, slightly burnt, and tasted a hundred times better than her soy cup of artisanal sadness. Mabel was a child of new New York—commercialized Times Square, bottomless brunch, cupcake confectionaries displacing decades-old bodegas—but sometimes when she drank a corner store coffee, inhaled a deep breath of hot dogs and garbage, and took in the leaves burning orange and falling over Central Park in a fiery rain, she could have sworn she had lived in this city since the roaring twenties.
“I love autumn here,” she exhaled absently.
She hadn’t expected him to pick up her aside, but he held out his phone to her again with the note, me too.
“Do you wanna walk?” The question was out before Mabel could consider what it meant. Were she and Theo casual, let’s-catch-up, coffee and stroll through Central Park friends now?
Did she want them to be?
As if he had a sixth sense for any time his son might have a whiff of a life outside of him, Teddy Dimas blew up Theo’s phone with a request to FaceTime. Eyes rolling back into his skull, Theo shook his head, at his phone but also in answer to Mabel’s question.
He declined the call and shot off a quick, hard-tapping text. Then, fingers flying just as fast, he wrote to Mabel, Another time?
Her brain—the distrustful, grudge-keeping, carry a knife because you might need it part—said stupid idea, Mora. Running into someone on the street and chatting for ten or twenty minutes was one thing. Making actual plans was another.
But what was she promising really by nodding her head? Another time could be five years from now. Another time could be two more cups of cheap bodega coffee and a brief afternoon of awkward conversation that circled around, “Hey, I’m glad neither of us are in jail! No, really!”
His ankle monitor glowed green, fully-charged. Mabel thought of whacking moles at lonely Coney Island and how it might be nice to go back and ride the roller coaster, feel weightless for once.
She didn’t know what that meant, except that when she nodded yes to another time, she hoped it would be much sooner than five years from now.
Taking his phone, she typed her number into his note and rejected a second call from Teddy Dimas. Seriously, fuck that grave-robbing, cuckolding guy.
| 2 |
She was fifteen minutes late and cursing the MTA.
“Sorry,” she said the moment she saw him, holding two coffees again. “The fucking 1.”
One what? Theo signed once he got a hand free.
Her hands felt instantly warmed around the cup, but her chest warmed too at the realization she had known what he signed without having to ask. “The subway line,” she answered aloud, deciding not to push her luck and try signing back to him.
The book on her nightstand advertised itself as for beginners and the librarian who checked it out for her said she’d have the basics down in no time. Well, the real test came today.
Walk? Theo asked before motioning down the Highline.
It had been his idea to walk the aboveground railroad line that once ran through Chelsea and had been repurposed as a walking path. Much like Central Park, the Highline was a patch of real green in an urban jungle and Mabel didn’t go to either often enough. The plants along the old train tracks had begun to brown, but the air above street level was light and breezy and the sky over them a cloudless blue.
Mabel took her first sip of coffee, tasting something deliciously nutty. The coffee wasn’t burnt either even though the nondescript brown cardboard cup screamed bodega.
“Wait.” She tugged his jacket sleeve and waited until his eyes were on her lips to ask, “Did you make this?”
He nodded, mouth twitching like he wasn’t sure whether to smile or frown.
Mabel went in for a second sip. It really did taste the best kind of homemade—fancy french press, almond milk, the works. She didn’t know what to make of it, so she signed thank you and didn’t go any further.
His eyebrows flew up. That was good, though he signed it almost to himself, not expecting her to pick it up.
She didn’t, exactly. She knew the sign for good and inferred the rest.
Thank you, and because she was feeling bold, added, again.
His eyes widened and he almost collided with a couple walking ahead of them on the tracks. As he steadied himself, a small smile tugged at his lips, one both surprised and pleased. All over a few little words. The warmth in Mabel’s chest grew, like someone had added logs to the fire.
Once Theo was putting one foot in front of another again without bowling into civilians, he pulled out his phone and tapped a note.
You’re learning to sign?
“Kind of,” Mabel answered, but didn’t know why she decided to be wishy-washy.
People “kind of” learned a language by downloading Duolingo and complaining about the owl on Twitter instead of rolling their sleeves up and doing the lessons. They didn’t transfer twice on the subway to visit the library branch with the better language section. They wouldn’t seriously consider taking a class with a real instructor and real fellow students and real proficiency exams.
Charles found the whole thing somewhat disturbing, because he second-guessed everything that wasn’t dating a serial murderer. “I’m just saying, this is a lot of effort to put in for a man who kidnapped you,” he had told her upon discovering her ASL book. A discussion about boundaries followed shortly after.
“Oh, that was more an unfortunate misunderstanding,” Oliver had dismissed. “And you know, since Teddy is the biological father of Will, that technically makes me Theo’s…”
“Nothing,” Mabel filled in flatly and refused to talk any more about Theo or sign language.
Mostly because she hadn’t wanted Charles or Oliver to ask her what Theo was asking now.
Why?
A mean excuse popped up, unsolicited: “Because I’m bored.”
She didn’t say it, because it wasn’t true and because it sounded exactly like something Zoe would say.
The couple strolling in front of them, the romantic walk Theo had almost gate-crashed, paused at the railing to gaze out at the Hudson. He could be any finance bro working an eight to eleven on Wall Street and she had cultivated the Upper East Side princess look to Gossip Girl-precision. Blonde hair, cut in a stylish bob brushing the shoulders of her cashmere coat. She lay her hand on her boyfriend’s chest, no engagement ring on her finger yet, but she did have a shiny red ruby.
Mabel didn’t taste her next sip of coffee.
It was disorienting and painful how abruptly she could remember her. She passed blondes on the street every day, sat across from them in subway cars, waited behind them in lines, and didn’t blink, but at just the right angle, caught under the right sun ray, she remembered everything.
Theo was looking at the woman, too, at the ring on her finger. Could he estimate its worth from a single glance? Or did he have to take it off the corpse first?
Now, Mabel was the one tripping over her feet. Theo caught her by the elbow, keeping her from face-planting, but the woman with the ruby ring snorted. Exactly as Zoe would have.
Mabel picked up her pace, putting a good few yards between her and the Zoe lookalike. Still, she had trouble bringing her breathing under control. She didn’t want to be bitter. She didn’t want to be angry. When she said she forgave Theo, she meant it. She wanted to keep meaning it.
A careful tap came on her shoulder. Theo had his phone held out, screen tilted towards her. I understand if you want to leave.
To Mabel, it practically read, I understand if you still hate me.
She shook her head first, then placed her barely-drunken coffee on the ground because she needed both hands free when she painstakingly signed, I don’t want to.
Theo winced, unable to hide it, so she knew she went wrong somewhere. With a sigh, she repeated out loud, “I don’t want to.”
Are you sure? He seemed resigned as he signed it, hands moving slowly, close to apologetic. He must assume she was just being polite.
A lot of people assumed a lot of things about Mabel, but no one who had met her more than once would ever accuse her of politeness. No one but Theo, who got used to thinking most people only engaged with him out of pity.
Mabel didn’t pity him—they had way too much bloody history—but they were striking close to the answer as to why she had picked up a book on sign language. No one made an effort with Theo, not even his father a good half of the time. Mabel wanted to put in what was starting to feel like the bare minimum.
“C’mon,” she said, picking up her coffee again. It had gone lukewarm, but still tasted better than everything pumped full of artificial sugar at Starbucks.
They resumed walking, their feet crunching the leaves fallen onto the slats. On the street below, the chatter of restaurant patrons enjoying the salad days of the outdoor brunch season drifted up to her ears and it made Mabel hungry for a Bryant Park waffle, with whipped cream and extra chocolate drizzle.
Her mouth was watering and she imagined her eyes as round as those waffles when Theo nudged her with his shoulder. He had another note typed out on his phone.
Maybe I can give you an ASL lesson sometime.
He was smiling, a little teasing, signaling the offer was half a joke.
Mabel decided not to take it as one. “I’d really like that.”
| 3 |
Her first bite of waffle burnt the roof of her mouth and got a dollop of whip cream on her nose.
Theo passed her a napkin, one he didn’t need in the first place because he hadn’t wanted a waffle. No sweet tooth apparently, even though she warned him that might be the one thing she'd hold against him.
They were making those jokes now. After they had left the library, a marble backdrop to their waffles, coffee, and American Sign Language meet-up, Theo had begun rifling through the book another librarian recommended to them. Something caught his eye and, with an incensed expression, he had taken a pen from his coat and struck out an entire paragraph.
“You remember that’s a library book, right?”
It’s wrong, he had signed, and then, on the same napkin she now used to wipe her nose, wrote, just don’t return it.
“Once a thief, always a thief, huh?” Mabel had mused. At the guilty twist to his smile, she had added, “I think befriending thieves is kind of my thing.”
Two things could simultaneously be true—Zoe and Theo were monumentally bad for each other and everyone’s lives would have been better for them never officially meeting, but Zoe and Theo were also similar in more ways than they could have ever known. Mabel liked finding the overlaps.
Theo took his coffee the same way Zoe had, a dash of light cream and no sugars. They both tolerated Mabel choosing a different milk option with every order. Neither wanted a waffle, but Zoe had stolen bites of Mabel’s and taken all the chocolate sauce for herself. Theo hadn’t asked for a bite and Mabel didn’t think he would, but she wondered if he’d try it, just for her.
“How do you sign waffle?” Mabel asked and watched his demonstration, repeating it carefully twice before asking, “And how do you sign, try a bite?”
Theo pressed his lips together, holding in his smile, and shook his head.
“Wow, that’s easy.” Mabel shook her head and nudged the plate across the table, even though the table was a small circle barely larger than a globe cut open and the plate had always been within his reach.
Theo pushed the plate back and knocked the toe of his boot against her ankle gently, in a sign Mabel wasn’t ready to interpret.
For the same reasons, she didn’t let herself scroll through their text messages—quadrupling with each passing day—and read into his tone and hers in return. This was their first in-person lesson, but twice she had found a reason to FaceTime him to confirm she was signing something correctly. And twice it should have been awkward but wasn’t.
She would think they were on a date if she were on the outside peeping in, people-watching in Bryant Park. Her aunt hated Midtown as not just a rule but a commandment and passed the hatred along to Mabel like a birthright, but they both made exceptions for Bryant Park in the fall. They staked out the holiday stalls for early bird deals on mittens and angel ornaments and drank hot chocolates while watching tourists ice skate on baby gazelle legs.
The rink hadn’t been set up yet, too early and global-warming hot in the season, but Mabel wouldn’t mind suffering the pilgrimage to Midtown again to see some slippery spills.
“Have you ever been ice skating?” she asked after a quick sip of coffee, half-and-half today and a dash of Splenda.
Theo furrowed his brow, not catching her meaning.
“Ice skating,” she repeated and tried to draw a figure-eight in the air. It just looked like she was waving an imaginary sparkler.
Recognition sparked in Theo’s eyes and he scrawled in the book Mabel definitely could not return now, ice skating?
Mabel nodded.
Underneath his clarification, Theo wrote, I hate Rockefeller Center. He tapped his left ear with the pen and with a smirk added, Too loud.
“I hate it, too,” she said with a smile. “Bryant Park also has…how do you sign it? Ice skating?”
Theo showed her a sign nothing like the pitiful figure eight she had attempted. Mabel echoed the sign when she asked again, “Have you ever tried ice skating?”
The question connecting—or, at least the vital two words of it—Theo nodded and held up one finger. In the desecrated library book, he wrote, I was terrible.
“You just need…” Mabel finished by signing her word of the month, practice.
She hardly deserved the joking applause Theo gave her, but accepted it anyway.
“We can try”—she signed ice skating without also speaking it—“here when they set up the rink. Or we could go to an actual pond. No long line of tourists, no…”
Theo cut her off by swinging his leg up, gesturing toward the monitor still snugly fit around his ankle. Right, no fleeing the state even for winter leisure activities in New England.
“Bryant Park it is,” Mabel said with a succinct nod. Theo eased his leg back to the ground, but Mabel lingered on the ankle monitor. Most of the time, she forgot it was there. The same surely couldn’t be said for him. “Do you ever wish…”
She trailed off, because she didn’t like the question she had been about to ask. Did Theo ever wish she, Charles, and Oliver had never caught on to the Dimas’s grave-robbing enterprise? Mabel would hate it if the answer were yes, but she would hate it more if that was as far as Theo would turn back time. One wish, and it would be for a get out of jail free card and not a resurrection.
While Mabel had been spiraling, Theo must have been writing. She noticed him finish with a strong period before flipping the book around for her to read the new lines.
We deserved to get caught. For all of it.
It was what she thought he’d say, deep down, but she appreciated seeing it written in ink.
Mabel slid the book back over to him, mindful of her chilling waffle, and asked, grinning, “How do you say you sure did?”
With an eye roll, only good humor, Theo showed her.
| 4 |
Central Park at the cusp of November really was something out of a movie.
Mabel didn’t consider herself a Nora Ephron girl—she had preferred David Fincher crime thrillers before her life became one—but the woman sure understood the beauty of a walk in the park, a cream sweater underneath a jacket in warm brown to match the leaves, a cup of coffee in one hand and nothing in the other. She took a deep breath in and barely smelled the garbage and hot dogs.
What she did smell was a whiff of Theo’s cologne, sandalwood and smoke. She had been noticing the cologne lately and how he barely broke a sweat hauling three-boxes worth of leftover Dimas deli delights up to his father’s apartment. His eyes got bluer every time she ran into him.
Today, his eyes about matched the sky and crinkled around the corners every time she made him laugh. Sometimes, she wished he was laughing at her and her terrible signing. At least then she could be annoyed at him instead of herself.
“Mabel with a crush,” Oliver had sung on their way down the elevator earlier. “It’s getting a little repetitive though, isn’t it? This will be your third season with a love interest and my third season without one, so what I was thinking—”
She had slipped on her headphones and turned Rina Sawayama up as loud as she went.
Not that Oliver was wrong, but Mabel was sick of her heart jumping into the ring even after losing every single previous round since she met Tim Kono in the courtyard of the Arconia. Soon, it would be a year since her fleeting fling with Alice, but she still had unhealed bruises, from her and from Oscar. From everyone who had taken a swing actually.
The butterflies erupting in her stomach as Theo plucked a wayward leaf from her hair clearly didn’t care.
His pointer finger tapped her temple before he pulled away. What are you thinking about, the gesture read.
“Nothing,” Mabel said quickly. She tucked her coffee into the crook of her elbow and signed the word for emphasis.
Theo squinted at her. The lady doth protest too much, as Oliver would say.
But he didn’t have a chance to interrogate her further. Two kids in oversized coats and beanies tugged over their ears, about to hit them dead-on, had their phones out and clearly live-streaming.
“Check out who we just ran into,” the taller of the two said to his adoring audience of five people including his mom, Mabel guessed. “It’s Bloody Mabel.”
His friend, not wanting to be one-upped, zeroed in on Theo. “And corpse boy! Dude, shouldn’t you be in jail for killing that chick?”
Mabel opened her mouth, prepared to tell them exactly where they could fuck off to, but Theo stepped between her and the guy’s camera. He plucked the phone from his hand, not anywhere close to how gently he had taken the leaf out of her hair, and tossed into the grass.
“What the fuck? That’s, like, assault!” The kid turned to his friend and asked into his phone lens, “You got that right? Corpse boy assaulted me.”
He probably kept ranting while he searched for his phone, but Mabel tuned out the noise pollution as Theo steered her away from the apparent crime scene. They ducked down a more secluded, wooded path, not speaking or signing anything. As they walked, Mabel tried not to think about how likely it was she’d be trending on Twitter within the hour.
Bloody Mabel. The stupid name shouldn’t have her hands shaking anymore.
Theo noticed, like he had noticed her brain running in overdrive before, and took their walking in the direction of the nearest bench. Mabel sank down with a sigh and curled her free hand around the bench’s armrest. Who cared about old gum. Hadn't her hands been covered in a lot worse?
They were idiots, Theo signed. Idiot had been one of the first words he taught her. He said he wanted her to be able to call him that whenever she wanted and be sure he got the message.
Mabel put her coffee aside and signed back, I know. His doubtful squint returned.
She did know, okay. She knew half the city’s population was made up of idiots and the other half were liable to stab someone on the subway same as she had. Bloody Mabel wasn’t special. Those parasites plugged into Instagram Live wouldn’t be the last to film her trying to live a regular life.
It didn’t make her any less sorry. Being the girl left holding the knife with blood on her coat and a blackout where the memory should be wasn’t a mood, or a vibe, or the origin story of an icon. Mabel felt freshly unhinged from herself whenever she thought back to Theo showing her that video, not recognizing the person in it and what she was capable of.
Theo pressed his small notebook against her thigh and Mabel took it. His message read, You’re allowed to forgive yourself.
When she glanced at him, he smiled a little, more of a flinch. Somehow, it did make her feel better. It was nice sitting next to a person who knew the worst things she had ever done. More than that, it was nice sitting next to a person who already believed it wasn’t who she was, deep within the hidden place inside her body that housed her soul.
She didn’t say, you’re allowed to forgive yourself, too. Their situations were different. They were different.
Picking up her coffee again, Mabel instead turned to face Theo and said, “Maybe next time we could go to an actual coffee place. Or a diner. You know less…” She shrugged her shoulder toward the runner coming up on their bench. As he passed, he did a full-on Brazzos double take. “…people.”
Theo took his notebook back and jotted down a quick, three-word answer.
It’s a date.
| 5 |
She might have dressed up for the occasion.
The occasion being a casual dinner at The Pickle Diner.
Dressing up to inhale one’s body weight in greasy diner food entailed, for sane people, a pair of distressed light-wash jeans and a dark-colored t-shirt, at best. Dressing up for The Pickle Diner, in the opinion of Oliver Putnam, demanded at minimum an ascot or a scarf of some silk flavor. Mabel hoped she struck a healthy balance somewhere between hungover Barnard student and disgraced-then-reinvigorated Broadway director of a certain age.
She shouldn’t be making it weird. Oliver and Charles made things weird, not Mabel. It was just that this could be a regular old friend and accomplice in Coney Island crime dinner or it could be an actual date.
“It’s a date,” Oliver had declared while raiding her wardrobe for outfit options. With her mom’s saintly patience, she had ignored the number of sweaters he was hiding in hopes of smuggling them back to his own apartment.
“I still think it’s a bad idea,” had come Charles, moping in the doorway. Every conversation they had had over the last five days started and ended with bad idea.
“A broken, terrible ‘50s record, our Charles,” Oliver had remarked with a hand to his heart. “Ignore him.”
“Hey, a ‘60s record!” Hearing himself, Charles had amended, “No, ‘70s!”
Somehow, her old men straight off the Muppets hadn’t made her any less nervous. Her heart had spent the week racing like it was training for the New York marathon. So, young women who could never decide what they wanted were cursed to suffer a constant low-level anxiety attack forever, good to know.
She kind of wanted it to be a date.
The bell over the door announced her arrival. She immediately spotted Theo in a booth towards the back, but he waved to her like she couldn’t pick him out of just about any crowd. As she made her way to the table, Mabel gave him a discreet once-over. He had gone with a cranberry sweater and a pair of dark corduroy pants. Far from hungover college student, even farther from the stylings of Oliver Putnam.
Date clothes, not date clothes—Mabel should have stolen a Cosmo from her mom on her last visit. The magazine would have a checklist she could run through. Sweater you’ve seen him in before? Not a good sign, girl. Pants with no rips or stains? He might be a ten.
Or Mabel’s vastly overthinking everything. She blamed a year of staring at a conspiracy board.
“Sorry I’m late,” she said, sliding into the opposite booth.
Theo shook his head. You’re not.
In front of her, and as if to prove his point, there was a cup of coffee still steaming. Beside the cup, someone had set out an array of little milk packets—whole, low-fat, half-and-half, and cream.
Mabel smiled to herself as she chose cream and decided against any sugar. Coffee, Theo and Zoe style.
As Mabel took her first sip, wincing at the heat and the lack of sweetness, she eyed Theo’s fingers drumming against the tabletop. He had his phone set beside his own coffee and picked it up, the Notes app already open, before he set it down again.
Can I ask you something, he signed instead.
She nodded.
He paused, fingers dancing around his cup’s saucer. Something inside Mabel relaxed, like a rubber band not stretched so tight, seeing Theo as nervous as she felt. She was starting to think she knew what question he had to ask her. And she was pretty sure of her answer.
Is this a date, he asked in a rapid burst, before he chickened out and left them in limbo. But still looking frustrated, he opted for his phone and typed out, a real date.
Carefully, thinking through every word as she signed it, Mabel said, I think so.
In the same note: Are you sure?
Was she sure? Charles might be right—it could be a bad idea, dating Theo Dimas.
She looked at him and saw Zoe, remembered Oscar taking away in handcuffs, thought of how Tim spent years terrified and alone with his secrets. Many days, she wished those pieces belonged to a different, finished puzzle she could pack away and divorce from the picture of Theo sitting in front of her now. The Theo who protected her on the subway and risked his parole to help her.
But Mabel thought she understood Theo well enough now to know he wouldn’t want her to split him into a Before Theo and After Theo. There was no way for them to meet again, in a park or because a drink spilled on the street. They were who they were, every crooked edge and stain of history, and it brought them to this moment, having coffee at The Pickle Diner at the beginning of a date.
I’m sure, Mabel signed, hopefully.
Whatever she had signed saw a smile blooming on Theo’s face. She really was improving every day.
The bell rang again and Theo blinked at the new arrivals like he wasn’t sure they were real. Mabel swiveled around, but she should have known by the look alone.
“Well, fancy running into you kids here!” Oliver said as he and Charles waltzed up to their booth.
“Don’t mind us.” Charles held up his hands, like he knew Mabel was readying to whack him in the chest. “We’ll just be over there.”
The pair took two seats at the counter, not nearly far enough away. Far enough would be them swimming with the fishes in the Hudson River. Mabel watched them stand up their menus so they could gossip behind them like the little old ladies of the Arconia and decided her and Theo’s next date would be in his neighborhood.
Theo, recovering from his befuddlement, typed a new message into his phone and sent it her way.
Are they on a date?
Mabel laughed, causing the two men in question to narrow their eyes from over the menus. She’d have to tease them about it all later.
“Honestly, who knows at this point.”
As she passed his phone back to him, their fingers brushed. Theo placed his phone face down on the table and brought his hand back, loosely entwining their fingers. His hand was warm from holding a cup of hot coffee.
Mabel squeezed his hand and forgave him for everything, all over again.