All the Colors of the Dark — Chapter 160

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They drove to Lake Pine the day the freeze set in. Patch helped Charlotte with her ice skates and huddled beside Misty as they watched the girl turn pirouettes, picking up such speed Patch worried she’d corkscrew right through and he’d have to head in after her.

“Thank you for not asking if I’m okay every thirty seconds,” Misty said.

“It’s because I don’t care all that much.”

She laughed, a sound he would commit to a memory already fleeting, his grip on their time fierce and loose. Charlotte grew taller, more beautiful and inquisitive and angry.

“I want to tell her,” Misty said, trussed beneath layers of blankets and a

pink woolen hat.

“No.”

“Soon though. She’ll love you. She’ll see how brilliant you are, Joseph Macauley.”

“Hush now, you’re too sick to make any kind of sense at all.”

Each week they drove to a facility in Alice Springs, where Misty had access to the finest facilities. A hundred acres of Missouri greens. The sign told it was a private palliative care center. Misty would stay at the large house in Monta Clare, but she liked to visit the friends she had made during her therapies. Patch would sit outside, Charlotte attending school, Mrs.

Meyer taking some time for herself. He bumped into Chief Nix, who gave up his Sundays to volunteer now. Nix smiled as he pushed a young woman in a wheelchair. Of course, Patch knew of cancer and the rising tide, but until then its reach seemed boundless, secular.

On the drive back they stopped at St. Raphael’s.

“I’m scared,” she said.

He hugged her tightly.

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