He told her. Not all of it. He told her about the girl on the bench, and the paper, and the date, and the back. He told her about the list. He did not tell her about Andy. He told her about the appeal language, family visitation, and he watched her face as he said it, and saw her register it, and saw her go very still.
"I didn't know that was in there either," she said quietly, after a while.
"Nobody does. Nobody reads the back."
"No." She turned the coffee cup in her hands. "Lloyd. The guy was going to sleep on a bench somewhere that winter. If not here, somewhere else. You know that. You didn't put him under that bridge."
"I know that," he said. "I've been told that twice already today. Once by a twelve-year-old and once by the mother of a twelve-year-old. Both of them were very fair about it." He looked down into his coffee. "That's the part I can't get around, Dina. They were fair to me. I wasn't fair to him. I didn't even look at him. He asked me if there was any way around it and I didn't even look up."
Kwiatek was quiet for a long time.
"Go home," she said finally. "Take the rest of the shift. Your knee's bothering you, that's what I'll put. I'll handle Stolte. I'll figure out what to say to the captain." She took the pad of warnings out of her jacket pocket and looked at it, and then she did something he did not expect. She slipped the rubber band off, and turned the pad over, and peeled back the top goldenrod sheet so she could see the back of it, and stood there in the noon light by the coffee cart on Front Street reading the eight paragraphs of gray print, all the way to the bottom, her lips moving very slightly, with her reading glasses on.
"Huh," she said, when she was done. She put the rubber band back on. She did not give him the pad. "Go home, Lloyd."
He went. But not home, not right away.
He walked back into the square first, slowly, along the west path, and he stopped at the copper beech, and Lavonne looked up from her paperback at him with deep suspicion.
"What," she said.