All the Colors of the Dark — Chapter 251

251

She dragged him by his hand, her body thin but strong as she heaved the heavy door open and the light fell on her fully.

Grace.

He stumbled after her, pulled back a little just to stare at her.

To see that she was real, standing right there as the rain soaked her dress through, her hair and her porcelain skin.

He tried to pull her back into the barn, but she pulled back just as firm, her eyes wild as her nails dug into his skin.

Grace slipped to her knees, fought back to her feet as the rain lashed

down.

Patch wrenched his hand free.

She squared to him, her eyes darting behind as she shoved him so hard he fell back. “Go now. You’ve seen that I’m here. That I’m okay.”

He stood firm, wiped the rain from his face and pushed his hair back and shook his head. “I’m not leaving you again.”

Anger flared in her as she shoved him once more. “You have to go. I

don’t need saving.”

Another shove.

“Get the fuck away from me. From here. You don’t understand.” She was crying, desperate, panicked, but he held his ground and caught her hands as she tried to push him again, and he pulled her close as she sobbed into his chest. “He’ll kill you, Patch. He promised me that. He swore it. And

he doesn’t break a promise.”

“Tell me what happened.”

She closed her eyes tight, like it was a dream, like his being there was just a dream as she spoke. Grace told him how she had grown up in the beautiful house, till her mother fell sick and passed away. She had no other family, so her father had been sought, and he took her with him across the country, from state to state on a quest she could not comprehend.

“Eli Aaron is your father.” He said, stunned.

He took a moment as, slowly, pieces more than two decades old begin to fit together to make a picture that near broke him apart.

“I was too young to know,” she said.

“It’s not your fault.”

“And then when I did, I was too scared to—”

“He didn’t kill me,” Patch said.

She cried, “I begged him. You hadn’t sinned. You wore a cross. In his mind he was doing God’s work. But he figured you saw him, that you knew where the house was. So he kept you there. And I sneaked down when I

could.”

“He wanted to take Misty.”

“He saw her on the front of the newspaper. The day Jane Roe won her case. And he didn’t forget her face.”

Patch thought of Misty holding that placard, smiling because for once human decency won out. He thought of those times when Grace was gone, the horrors he had conjured now different, but no less.

She smoothed the hair from her eyes. “For three hundred and seven days you were mine, Patch. You were my connection to something real, something pure and real. I could be someone different. That’s the thing about the dark. You could look at me and not see the things I’d seen. I could teach you everything I learned from books, everything I saw when we traveled. I could lead you where I needed you to go, to make right what I could not.”

He gripped her hand so tight, afraid she might slip from him again.

“And then the girl came. And I watched her on the cameras.”

He thought of Saint. Of the bravest person he had ever known.

“And I willed her to pull the trigger. To end it all. But then I saw the smoke. And I felt the heat. And you were so sick, but I dragged you out and left you. And my father took me. There’s a hundred ways off that land that

the cops didn’t find.”

She was crying harder.

He moved to tell her it was okay, but he knew that it wasn’t. None of it was.

“I saw the flashlights and the cops, and I knew you’d be okay, because you had a mother, and you had friends and a school and a life. And you could move past it. You could move past me.”

I didn’t, he thought. I couldn’t.

“We drove back to Alabama.”

“You didn’t go to the cops?”

He saw the terror in her eyes, fear he had once known well. Fear that claimed parts of you till you no longer knew your own mind.

“He’d kill me. There’s cameras here. There’s a room just like the one you were kept in. And when he leaves me there…I’m so grateful when he comes back. I’m so grateful to see the light again.”

Patch died for her, for her nightmare that had run far longer than his.

“And then I saw you in the newspaper. You were just a kid, but your paintings. The house. This house.”

He cast his mind back to that first exhibition in Monta Clare.

“My father saw it, too.

“If I tried to escape, he promised he’d go find you after he killed me. He doesn’t lie, Patch. He doesn’t ever lie.”

He pressed his forehead to hers.

He thought back over the search, of the missing girls. He thought of Saint and Sammy, Charlotte and Norma. He thought of the Mad House.

Despite all he had been through, he had lived. And Grace had not. He felt his muscles tighten, that dull ache in the pit of his stomach, the coursing of blood in his veins.

“All I ever wanted was to be normal, Patch. To fix up this house because it holds the only decent memories I have. It’s all I ever dream

about. You believe in second chances?”

“I do, Grace. So long as there’s no reminders, nothing calling you back.”

“I need you to leave now. I need you to go and move on, and forget about me, just like I’ll forget about you.”

“We—”

Grace smiled. “There is no we. We don’t get our happy endings. I don’t get to live my normal life here. I can’t go back into the darkness. I can’t

ever do that again. It’s not—”

“Your father,” he said. “Where is he?”

Grace shook her head, but he caught it.

The single glance over his shoulder to the barn behind her.

He moved toward it.

She screamed at him to stop.

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