I would always be sorry that he had spent his last days here without me, and I would never recover from the heartless irony that I had been detained by the butchery Carrie had wrought. It had been the beginning of the end that would be Benton’s end.

It was easy for me to wish I had never gotten involved in the case. But had I not, someone else would be attending a funeral somewhere in the world, as others had in the past, and the violence would not have stopped. Rain began to fall lightly. It touched my face like cool, sad hands.

“Benton brought us together here this day not to say goodbye,” began Reverend Lloyd. “He wanted us to gather strength from each other and go on doing what he had done. Upholding good and condemning bad, fighting for the fallen and holding it all inside, suffering the horrors alone because he would not bruise the gentle souls of others. He left the world better than he found it. He left us better than he found us. My friends, go do as he had done.”

He opened his Bible to the New Testament.

“‘And let us not be weary in well doing: for in due season we shall reap, if we faint not,’” he read.

I felt hot and arid inside and could not stop the tears. I dabbed my eyes with tissues and stared down at the sand dusting the toes of my black suede shoes. Reverend Lloyd touched a fingertip to his lips and voiced more verses from Galatians, or was it Timothy?

I was vague about what he said. His words became a continuous stream, like water flowing in a brook, and I could not make out the meaning as I fought and blocked images that without fail won. Mostly I remembered Benton in his red windbreaker, standing out and staring at the river when he was hurt by me. I would have given the world to take back every harsh word. Yet he had understood. I knew he had.

I remembered his clean profile and the imperviousness of his face when he was with people other than me. Perhaps they found him cold, when in fact his was a shell around a kind and tender life. I wondered if we had married if I would feel any different now. I wondered if my independence had been born of a seminal insecurity. I wondered if I had been wrong.

“Knowing this, that the law is not made for a righteous man, but for the lawless and disobedient, for the ungodly and for sinners, for unholy and profane, for murderers of fathers and murderers of mothers, for manslayers,” the reverend was preaching.