All the Colors of the Dark

by Chris Whitaker

The Nix house

Omg was it Nix?

He made no move to walk toward her, and for that, and a million other reasons, she loved him totally.

“Aim a gun at someone and the truth will come out.” “And here I am, aiming a gun at you,” she said. He smiled once, quick, like she had grown up under his gaze. “I’m afraid it’s not my story to tell, Saint.”

Till her throat burned. Till she heard the single gunshot.

Oh Nix killed himself

That night Cooper walked with the slightest limp.

Oh shit, is that Patch who just escaped while disguised as Cooper?

Someone once told him that the bad things no longer matter if you choose not to repeat them.

“You rarely see all of someone. Not for a long time. And often, when you do, it’s too late.

Saint

“Goddamn you, Sammy.” He held both hands up. “I didn’t have anything to do with this.”

“I once heard that there ain’t much more dangerous than a man with nothing to lose.”

Tug

This time he met her eye and smiled. “My surname is Strike. My name is Cooper Strike.”

Eloise's brother

“He dropped off his last will the morning before…before it happened.” “Why?” she said, a question he could not answer.

Because he knew Saint would figure it out

“Owen Williams.” Saint pinched the bridge of her nose. “Let me guess, daughter named Lucy?”

“Darnell Richardson.”

Blackjack

Saint gripped the receiver tight. “Match to Martin Tooms. And Joseph Macauley.”

Why are there prints on that letter?

And then, on the shelf, placed haphazardly, as if it would be discovered by chance on some distant date, she saw a single letter. And on the envelope, her name.

Just being there so they knew they were not alone. She thought of the girls, some not even older than she had been back then, turning up at the farmhouse and being led to the room where he took one life to save another. No questions were asked. No blame apportioned. Girls from church towns, from unforgiving families. Wealthy. Poor. He gave them their lives back. And then someone found out.

So Tooms was giving abortions for those who needed one

“You told me you killed Grace,” she said. He straightened a little. “I treated Joseph’s mother for over a decade. I watched her getting worse. It was my duty to inform Social Services.” “But you didn’t.”

Nix told me she wasn’t real. That Joseph conjured her.”

When he calmed he drank a little. “The hemorrhage. It’s always a risk, but there was just…I just couldn’t stop the bleeding.”

So Callie died from abortion complications? Maybe Nix killed Richie because Callie was abused by her father? Idk just a guess

Saint knew love, she knew it was sewn into the smallest gestures, the kindnesses barely perceived. And she knew it was responsible for the largest and darkest acts, the sacrifices and the rawest pain. And when Tooms spoke his name, she heard it in his voice. “Nix.”

Wait were Nix and Tooms in love?

“Callie was pregnant. You know that. But when she lay there, when she started bleeding, when she started to fade, she told me who the father was.”

Richie her dad?

“I wrote to Richie. I needed him to know that someone knew. That he wouldn’t live out his days in peace. I wrote to Richie, and I gave the letter to Patch. I thought maybe he’d give it to Sammy to post.”

That is how their prints were on there

Patch lay back and swallowed drily, and for a wretched moment felt tears brim in his eye as he tried not to feel the devastation he had wreaked, the lives he had dictated in his search for a girl that had spanned the better years of his life. From boy to man. From Monta Clare to robbing banks, art exhibitions to prison. He had lost a daughter, a friend, a love, and a parent. He had lost more than could ever be counted.

“I found you,” he said. “I waited for you,” she said.

“You were my dreams and my nightmares. I’ve lived this moment a thousand times, but it was selfish, and you have to go.”

Grace

She squeezed his hand so tight. “In case my father finds you.”

Maybe Eli is Grace's father? Idk

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

Ok i guessed it at the last moment lol

“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.”

That could have been Saint...she wanted to go to that protest

“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.”

Grace

Grace smiled. “There is no we. We don’t get our happy endings.

To love and be loved was more than could ever be expected, more than enough for a thousand ordinary lifetimes.

She lifted it out with care, set it down beside their mailbox, and did not dare think of him inside there, growing up in that house, free on that land so beautiful she felt a swell of longing grow heavier still.

Is this her child? Did she have her baby instead and not an abortion?

Maybe it was the memory of Jimmy not letting her finish, not letting her tell him she had visited the clinic but could not go through with the abortion because she had once made a promise to God, a promise that saw her friend return safe from his own hell, a promise that saw her cast out, whispered of, a pariah in the small town that she so loved.