Chap­ter 182 of All the Col­ors of the Dark begins with a qui­et yet intense con­ver­sa­tion between Himes and Saint, tak­ing place at a café near the fed­er­al build­ing. This loca­tion, often a refuge for the two, serves as the back­drop for an exchange filled with per­son­al reflec­tions and heavy emo­tions. Himes opens the dis­cus­sion by sug­gest­ing that per­haps a woman could have mis­judged a sit­u­a­tion, but Saint sharply coun­ters, speak­ing with cer­tain­ty about her belief, stat­ing, “I saw it in her eyes,” show­cas­ing her unwa­ver­ing con­vic­tion. This dia­logue reflects their dif­fer­ing per­spec­tives, where Himes main­tains a prag­mat­ic approach, while Saint grap­ples with the weight of her con­vic­tions, a recur­ring theme through­out their rela­tion­ship.

Saint spends the week delv­ing into Eli Aaron’s painful past, uncov­er­ing details that only deep­en her under­stand­ing of his trou­bled his­to­ry. She learns that Aaron entered a fos­ter home at the young age of six, set­ting the stage for a dif­fi­cult and emo­tion­al­ly charged upbring­ing. Fur­ther inves­ti­ga­tion reveals the trag­ic sto­ry of Aaron’s moth­er, caught in the grip of addic­tion and ulti­mate­ly suc­cumb­ing to an over­dose. These grim rev­e­la­tions evoke a sense of res­ig­na­tion in Saint, who, despite the famil­iar­i­ty of such pain, remains unmoved by Aaron’s trou­bled child­hood. The his­to­ry, though trag­ic, offers no new insights into the woman who had haunt­ed Saint’s thoughts for years—a woman she had once fol­lowed home after con­fes­sion, now only known through the vague rec­ol­lec­tions shared by Sis­ter Cecile.

As their con­ver­sa­tion con­tin­ues, Saint reflects on her feel­ings of guilt and remorse, shar­ing the per­son­al toll the inves­ti­ga­tion has tak­en on her. She admits to Himes that her strug­gle with the past is far from over, reveal­ing the inner tur­moil she feels regard­ing the death of some­one she once thought she had killed. “I real­ly thought I killed him, Himes. He’s already dead,” she con­fess­es, acknowl­edg­ing the deep weight of her past actions and their ongo­ing impact on her present state of mind. This raw admis­sion high­lights the com­plex­i­ty of guilt and the dif­fi­cul­ty in let­ting go of past mis­takes, which con­tin­ues to haunt her as she nav­i­gates her rela­tion­ship with Eli Aaron and the ghosts of her own actions.

The con­ver­sa­tion takes an unset­tling turn when Himes brings up the recent pur­chase of rosary beads by Eli Aaron, a detail that sug­gests the ongo­ing strug­gles and pat­terns in his life. Saint responds affir­ma­tive­ly, acknowl­edg­ing the impli­ca­tions of this action, but Himes cuts through her acknowl­edg­ment with a chill­ing reminder: “It means you have to kill him again.” This stark state­ment forces Saint to con­front the cycli­cal nature of her rela­tion­ship with Eli, where past actions seem to per­pet­u­ate them­selves in a nev­er-end­ing loop of guilt and con­se­quence. The ten­sion in this exchange under­scores the com­plex­i­ty of human rela­tion­ships, where the lines between right and wrong, guilt and redemp­tion, become increas­ing­ly blurred.

As the chap­ter unfolds, themes of guilt, emo­tion­al tur­moil, and the inescapable past come to the fore­front. Saint is left to grap­ple with not only her per­son­al his­to­ry but also with the dark­er, more dis­turb­ing aspects of Eli Aaron’s choic­es. Himes’s blunt prag­ma­tism serves as a stark con­trast to her emo­tion­al fragili­ty, empha­siz­ing the dif­fi­cul­ty of fac­ing one’s past while nav­i­gat­ing the weight of unre­solved guilt. The dia­logue between them high­lights the ways in which the past refus­es to stay buried, forc­ing both char­ac­ters to con­front painful truths and grap­ple with the con­se­quences of their actions. As the chap­ter con­cludes, read­ers are left with a deep sense of unease, know­ing that Saint’s jour­ney toward redemp­tion and res­o­lu­tion will require fac­ing dif­fi­cult truths about her­self and the peo­ple who have shaped her life.