In Chap­ter 182 of “All the Col­ors of the Dark,” Himes and Saint sit togeth­er in a café out­side the fed­er­al build­ing, a com­fort­able retreat where they often seek solace or pon­der the weight of their past deci­sions. The con­ver­sa­tion begins with Himes sug­gest­ing the pos­si­bil­i­ty that a woman might be mis­tak­en about her per­cep­tions, to which Saint coun­ters, empha­siz­ing the cer­tain­ty she felt by stat­ing, “I saw it in her eyes.”

Saint has spent the week inves­ti­gat­ing the life of Eli Aaron, unearthing a painful his­to­ry. He dis­cov­ers a ledger that doc­u­ments Aaron’s arrival at a fos­ter home at the ten­der age of six. Com­pound­ing this back­sto­ry, he learns about Aaron’s moth­er, who was trapped in a cycle of addic­tion and ulti­mate­ly suc­cumbed to an overdose—a nar­ra­tive all too famil­iar to Saint, evok­ing lit­tle more than a resigned accep­tance as she reads about it.

Despite her efforts, Saint reveals that the only infor­ma­tion she gained about the woman who haunt­ed her past—who she had fol­lowed home from con­fes­sion years ago—was what Sis­ter Cecile had pre­vi­ous­ly shared. Wrestling with her inner tur­moil, she express­es remorse, say­ing, “I real­ly thought I killed him, Himes. He’s already dead.”

As their con­ver­sa­tion unfolds, Himes ref­er­ences Aaron pur­chas­ing more rosary beads that year, a detail that implies deep­er impli­ca­tions about his ongo­ing strug­gles. Saint responds affir­ma­tive­ly, only to receive a grim reminder from Himes about the con­se­quences of that action, lead­ing to the chill­ing ulti­ma­tum: “It means you have to kill him again.”

This chap­ter encap­su­lates themes of guilt, the inescapable nature of one’s past, and the dark cycli­cal pat­terns with­in human lives. Saint grap­ples not just with her con­science but also with the haunt­ing real­i­ty of Eli Aaron’s life choic­es, while Himes’s blunt prag­ma­tism offers a stark con­trast to her emo­tion­al tur­moil. Their dia­logue empha­sizes the com­plex­i­ty of human rela­tion­ships and the bur­dens they car­ry as they nav­i­gate mem­o­ries that refuse to let go.