The Evangeline by D. W. Buffa

suppose…’
    ‘Suppose? You’re incorrigible. I should know better than to rely on a lawyer’s promise.’
    ‘A lawyer’s promise?’ said Darnell, a sparkle in his pale grey eyes.‘A lawyer who knows what a promise is, would be more like it. A promise, to be enforceable, has to be supported by a promise in return. I promised this would be my last case, but what promise did I get in return? Are you going to stop the practice of medicine? Give up your blissful sixty-hour week and spend the rest of your days puttering around the garden with me? Remind me, but I don’t remember any promise like that.’
    ‘Better bring a jacket,’ she told him, shaking her head. ‘It’s November now. I don’t want you catching cold.’
    He did not think he needed one, but she worried about him and he liked that she did. If he would not yield to her in the larger questions of his life, he did not mind doing what she asked in the smaller ones. He threw on a corduroy jacket and caught up with her at the car.
    ‘And how was your week, Dr Blaine?’ he asked as she drove. ‘I envy you a little, able to help people without harming anyone else.’ He watched the houses set far back on the hillside slip by, neighbours he scarcely knew. ‘That would have been a good life, never having to choose. Although I suppose it must happen sometimes,mustn’t it? When you have two people dying and you don’t have time to save them both. That’s what intrigues me so much about this case: the moral ambiguity of everything that happened. I keep wondering what I would have done if I had been in Marlowe’s place.’
    She kept her eyes on the twisting road, but her gaze, or so it seemed to Darnell, became more intense. ‘You can’t always help. Sometimes the best thing you can do is not to help at all.’
    ‘I’ve thought about that, too,’ he replied, staring out the window at the familiar scene, the route they travelled together the first or second Saturday of every month.‘Doctors who let their patients go; the ones who decide that the only life left is pain and suffering, and that to prolong the agony makes medicine a kind of evil. It must happen every day, but no one would ever admit it because life— existence—is the only standard on which anyone can agree. That is what I keep coming back to: that there are certain things that should never be made public. I’m a lawyer, and there are rules. If you start making exceptions, arguing that in certain instances the rules don’t apply, then it isn’t long before everything is an exception and the rules don’t exist. And so we insist that everyone follow the rules even when we know there are times when that might be the worst thing anyone could do. Marlowe should never have been charged with murder, and yet charging him with murder was the only thing the prosecution could have done. What happened out there should have stayed a secret, but there were too many survivors for that. It was not enough that they were alive, they wanted absolution, too. This is both the greatest case I have ever had and the worst. The law wasn’t made for this,’ he said, growing more energetic.‘It’s too far out of the common experience.’
    Summer parked the car and from the back seat retrieved two small bouquets. She gave one of them to Darnell. Holding hands, they walked up the path that led between the rows of headstones until they were at the very top of the cemetery.
    ‘A few minutes,’ she said.With a wistful glance, she let go of his hand and, while he headed in one direction, she went in the other.
    When Summer Blaine reached her husband’s grave, she looked back over her shoulder, waiting until Darnell had gone the farther distance to where his wife lay buried. He did not turn around to look at her; he never did. She smiled to herself, then bent down and replaced the old flowers, withered with age, with the new.
    She was waiting for him at the path when he returned. ‘Did you have a good