Chap­ter 193 of All the Col­ors of the Dark deep­ens the emo­tion­al con­flict between Patch and Mar­ty Tooms as the ten­sion sim­mers in the con­fined space they share. Tooms, fac­ing the final stretch of his life, reveals the bit­ter truth that lingers in his heart—he has lived long enough only to die with­in prison walls. His words car­ry the tone of a man bur­dened not just by the cer­tain­ty of death but by the irony of his sur­vival. He’s not a man beg­ging for for­give­ness; he’s some­one who has reached the edge of reflec­tion, real­iz­ing too late how lit­tle pow­er remains in his hands. Patch, on the oth­er hand, is over­whelmed by a des­per­ate need for answers. He wants the truth about Grace—about whether she’s still alive, where she might be, or if she’s tru­ly lost. The frus­tra­tion inside him builds, and he admits he’d drag Tooms from his cell by force if that would bring the answers he needs.

Though Patch’s anger is fiery, Tooms doesn’t flinch. Instead, he remains eeri­ly com­posed, respond­ing with qui­et sad­ness and emo­tion­al fatigue. His calm reply is more haunt­ing than any shout, reveal­ing a man who’s already accept­ed what lies ahead. He speaks of the exe­cu­tion chamber—its arti­fi­cial chill, the ster­ile sheets, and the plas­tic restraints. He visu­al­izes the moment his life will end not with chaos, but with silence and a nee­dle. Tooms reflects on how activists will come to wit­ness the exe­cu­tion, not nec­es­sar­i­ly for him, but as a sym­bol­ic protest. Their pres­ence is more per­for­mance than com­pas­sion. Mean­while, Patch will be left in the shad­ows, car­ry­ing the emo­tion­al after­math alone. This dif­fer­ence high­lights the way pub­lic jus­tice and pri­vate grief often exist in entire­ly sep­a­rate worlds.

Patch’s voice breaks the qui­et, not with rage this time, but with sor­row. He asks a ques­tion he’s feared for too long: is Grace dead? The ques­tion hangs heav­i­ly in the air, and Tooms does not imme­di­ate­ly answer. Instead, he turns away and looks toward the world he no longer belongs to. A sin­gle tear traces down his cheek, and for the first time in a long while, the emo­tion breaks through. This sim­ple ges­ture says more than any expla­na­tion could. His silence and sad­ness are their own answer—one that leaves Patch hol­low. The con­ver­sa­tion shifts from inter­ro­ga­tion to shared grief, from demands to under­stand­ing that nei­ther man can undo the past or reclaim what they’ve lost. Patch sees it clear­ly now: even if Grace were alive, the man before him is too bro­ken to lead him to her.

As the moment stretch­es on, Patch tries to piece togeth­er what lit­tle hope remains. He had come look­ing for direc­tion, a glim­mer of pur­pose, or maybe even a lie to cling to. But what he finds is some­thing qui­eter and more painful—the truth that he might be alone in his search. Tooms, in his final days, is no longer the ene­my but a reflec­tion of what hap­pens when regret is all that’s left. The emo­tion­al crescen­do of this chap­ter lies not in any rev­e­la­tion, but in the real­iza­tion that both men are pris­on­ers of some­thing far greater than the con­crete and steel around them. They are bound by time, mem­o­ry, and guilt—each car­ry­ing their own ver­sion of a life inter­rupt­ed. Through this exchange, the nar­ra­tive explores the bound­aries of for­give­ness, the price of truth, and the weight of loss.

This chap­ter is not only about clo­sure, but also about the pain of liv­ing with­out it. Tooms, with lit­tle left to offer, shows that some answers may nev­er come, no mat­ter how des­per­ate­ly they are sought. Patch, bur­dened with the aching absence of Grace, must now wres­tle with the pos­si­bil­i­ty that what he’s chas­ing isn’t a per­son, but a ver­sion of hope long since gone. The emo­tion­al com­plex­i­ty of their interaction—marked by anger, sor­row, and resignation—reveals how tight­ly the past can wrap itself around the present, and how even in the final hours, the human need for con­nec­tion and mean­ing refus­es to fade.