All the Colors of the Dark — Chapter 186

186

There was a moment before it came to him, before he questioned the cold trail of fate, and in that moment he saw his daughter, wearing her new necklace and tending her bees, just as Saint had once done with her grandmother.

He stared at the man, at his hands and arms, his mouth and lips and eyes. Patch knew well about the rot that set in just beneath, how you couldn’t tell shit about someone from the way they looked or the job they did. To see it you had to gut them; you had to look deep inside for the poison in their veins.

Jimmy said something else, added a laugh, but Patch heard none of it, just saw Saint, his friend, in all her pure and good. He saw her crawling through tangled woodland, the bite of winter deep in her bones as she pushed on looking, seeking him out while the world around had long since buried him. He saw the way she cared for her grandmother, the way she was with Charlotte, how this man had taken so much from someone who only gave.

Patch knew there were moments when you made your bad decision even when you were fully aware of what would come.

He also knew that he would not allow his daughter to grow up in a world where the good stand by idle. In a world where her father did not stand up for the few he cared for. He once told Nix he had left the old version of himself back in the dark. But he knew then that wasn’t entirely true. He had once told Saint they were a team. Come at one, come at both.

“Jimmy,” Patch said.

Jimmy nodded.

“You remember me?”

“I remember you, Joseph,” Jimmy said.

“And you remember Saint. You remember beating her. You remember

telling everyone in town—”

“That she murdered my child.”

Patch knew about the notion of purpose, of free will and a divine goal.

He knew about determinism and the need to shape a future.

He knew it might have been the one bad thing Jimmy Walters had done.

That maybe he could rewrite that turned chapter and save his own story.

There was much that Patch knew.

But nothing that could change what would happen next.

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