Page 34 of Worth of Waste

Maybe it was the sound of his throat clearing, something he’d done time and time again when he felt like he was inserting himself into her time and life and didn’t deserve to be there, so he tried to give her warning.

Maybe it was the way her heartrate picked up.

Or the shaky breath she released.

Karen couldn’t pinpoint exactly what it was that explained how she knew, she just did.

Dino.

“I met a girl once,” he said behind her, “and she only had to talk to make me smile.”

Karen didn’t know what to say, but she knew he was talking about her. “Oh?”

“Fascinating woman, really.”

“I bet.”

“I fucked it up, though.”

Karen blinked, her vision cloudy from gathering wetness. “You don’t know that.”

“Don’t I?” he asked softly. “I’m still trying to figure out how to tell her I’m sorry.”

Jesus.

Karen patted the seat beside hers on the bench. “Sit.”

Dino didn’t make her tell him again.

Dino

SETTING the small Styrofoam package at his side on the bench, Dino settled into his seat, torn between giving the woman at his side all of his attention, and looking out at the toddling baby playing at the edge of the sandbox.

Dino had so many questions.

He had so much he wanted to say.

Right then, all he could do was stare.

“When did you get out?” Karen asked.

Dino cleared his throat, getting out of his head and back to the present. “A couple of days ago.”

He didn’t offer the rest of the story, because frankly, there wasn’t much to tell. That was probably the saddest part. He’d come out of the prison in a sort of haze with a brown paper bag under his arm of all the possessions he had gone into the prison with. It’d taken him an entire ten minutes of standing outside the gates, staring down the walkway, before he realized no one was waiting there for him.

No one to pick him up.

No one to take him home.

He’d come out entirely alone.

Much the same way he had gone in.

“You didn’t think to call?” Karen asked. “Maybe let me know you would be coming around?”

Dino chuckled. He heard the annoyance in her voice, but the relief was far clearer to him. She wasn’t mad—not about him showing up like this. Of that, he was most sure.

“Had to find you first,” Dino explained. “You changed your number, and then you moved. I didn’t have that new info.”