All the Colors of the Light (All the Colors of the Dark Continued)

Patch stood on the bow, his boots gripping the slick wood as the waves slammed hard against the hull. Overhead, the sky had turned the color of bruised slate, heavy and dark. He thought of Charlotte and the quiet oath he’d sworn to her before setting out. All through the long heat of summer, she and Saint had come down to the harbor under the cover of dark, meeting him right where his boat swayed in the dark slip. Night was the only hour that offered any cover; the law was still scouring the county, looking for any trace of a fugitive on the run.

But he couldn’t afford to wait for nightfall now. Above him, the sky boomed, its low, grumbling clouds threatening to churn the sea into an insurmountable wall of water. The canvas flapped frantically against the mast, a harsh, whipping crack that warned him to turn back now or risk being swallowed whole by the storm, lost to the deep.

Working with grim speed, Patch hauled on the main halyard, fighting the wind as he doused the sail to keep the gusting gale from capsizing the rig. The ropes dug into his palms, but he lashed the canvas tight to the boom, securing every line with double hitches before throwing his full weight against the heavy tiller. He hauled the vessel around, nose pitching deep into the dark swell, and aimed the bow straight back toward the faint, shadowy line of the coast.

Tied fast inside the harbor, Patch lowered himself down into the hatch as the rain began to beat angrily against the deck above. He was safe from the gale, but he was miles up the coast from where anyone would think to search for him—far from the slip where Charlotte and Saint knew to look.

He unlatched the cabinet door. His paints had shifted during the turbulent return, tumbling together, but nothing was broken. He had always preferred the calm of open water for his work—the gentleness of the ocean breeze, the soft, pale wash of a blue sky filtering down. But inside the cramped, shadowy hatch, lit only by the flashlight swaying on its hook, the darkness felt hauntingly familiar. It echoed the frantic, desperate days of his past, when he had locked himself away to paint the faces of the missing girls from memory.

Except the fear that used to drive his hands was gone. Now, it was only love.

Patch closed his single eye as he faced the blank canvas. With a dab of cadmium yellow resting on the tip of his brush, he didn't need the sun to see. In the quiet behind his eyelid, Saint was already there.

*

Sheets of rain doused the windshield of the Crown Victoria, as the heavy wipers slapped back and forth in a futile fight against the downpour. Saint peered through the blurry glass at the empty, churning water of the dark slip.

Patch hadn’t come.

“Do you think he got caught in the storm?” Charlotte pulled her feet down from the dash, leaning her forehead against her window to stare out into the black night. Her voice was thin, laced with a familiar edge of panic.

“No,” Saint said, her palms throbbing against the cold leather as she gripped the steering wheel tight. “I don’t. Patch… he knows when a storm is coming. He can feel the air change before anyone else. Think how long he’s been staying out on that water and coming back to us. He knows those swells. He knows how to survive.”

She stared out at the dark, empty harbor, her mind holding steady despite the roar of rain on the cruiser's roof.

He hadn't been caught. He had altered his course…somewhere safe…somewhere down the coastline—somewhere the sheriff wouldn't be watching.

Calling the Coast Guard was out of the question— that was just handing the authorities a map to a fugitive. She’d find him on her own. She found him once she could do it again.Saint shifted the cruiser into drive, the transmission clunking into gear. No, if Patch would have worked his way harbor by harbor up the coast until he found safe harbor.

“Damn you, Patch,” Charlotte said, but her voice quivered. “Where the hell are you?” She slammed her hand against the window—hard—a sharp thump sending a flicker of rain drops flying off the glass. "What if his boat took on water? What if he couldn’t get back fast enough?”

Charlotte’s hand dropped from the glass and reached across the  console, gripping Saint’s sleeve.

Saint didn't flinch. She kept one hand firm on the wheel, letting her eyes drift over the empty water one last time before looking directly at Charlotte.

“He isn't on the rocks,” Saint said, her voice full of certainty. “Patch survived a cellar in the dark, Charlotte. He survived being hunted. She shifted the Crown Vic into gear, the engine giving a low, steady rumble against the storm.

"We go north," Saint said, turning the wheel toward the highway. They would check every marina, every dock, and every single slip on the coast until they found him.

*

It had been hours since Patch settled in this harbor, tucked away off the radar of the law. The canvas, blank hours ago, now held her face—the fierce, unyielding cut of Saint’s jaw, the seriousness in her eyes that carried a weight far older than her years, and the stubborn set of her mouth that refused to surrender to anything. Her dark eyes stared at him from where he had left the easel right beside the converted table bed. He had laid here, unable to sleep for longer than he thought he could, the heavy scent of the drying paint and the faintness of sea salt filling the small cabin.

He thought of Saint arriving at the empty harbor just to turn away. He knew her mind—knew she had the relentless instinct of a tracker, a stubbornness that wouldn't let her rest until she had pieced every trail together. But he also knew this storm was the hardest to hit the coast since the autumn floods three years ago. She might pull over at a motel and wait it out. Come morning, she’d know he’d be off at sea again until the following evening. She’d go back then.

The boat swayed, a slow, rhythmic pull against its lines, and his mind drifted back to the time they ran into each other in town. Charlotte was thirteen. He was trying to buy paints at the hardware store with  change he’d scraped together, his head heavy and buzzed from cheap liquor. He held Saint in his arms and they danced right there on the sidewalk, swaying like the boat did now, her head resting against his chest while the world kept spinning around them.

He closed his eye, and he could almost feel her in his arms now, the faint scent of rain and old paper clinging to her coat, the memory of her sitting beside him on the dock as the sun dipped low, steadily holding a box of cheap paints so he wouldn't have to stop working. Then he could nearly hear her voice calling his name, "Patch," lost in the howl of the wind. Then he heard it again.

The third time, he opened his single eye. It was not the wind. It was Saint. Really Saint.

He unlatched the hatch and swung it open to the storm. As he reached out, Saint and Charlotte practically tumbled down into the cabin's dim glow, soaked through and falling straight into his arms. Saint looked up at him, her face tight with a fierce, quiet resolve—a flicker of exhaustion and worry hidden just beneath her dark eyes. It had clearly taken them hours of searching the coastline in the dark, but her gaze was as unwavering as ever.

Charlotte clutched his arms, her voice sharp and jagged to cover the tremble in her breath. "Dammit, Patch, it's my last night before school starts! Do you have any idea how many harbors we had to search through in this damn rain? You almost made us miss you." She slammed a hand against his shoulder, but her grip didn't loosen for a second. "Don't you ever pull a stunt like that again."

“I’m here, Charlotte. If you hadn’t found me, I’d come for you. I promised, didn’t I? I’ll always find you.”

*

The rain had softened to a gentle pitter-patter against the deck above. Exhausted from hours of searching in the downpour, Charlotte had finally given in to sleep, swimming in Patch’s oversized sweats. She was tucked away in the forward berth at the bow, the small wooden accordion door drawn shut, leaving him and Saint alone in the quiet.

Saint stepped out from behind the narrow curtain of the head, drying her hair with a faded towel. She wore an oversized cotton thermal—stiff and rough from old splotches of his paint that had never washed out. She took a seat on the edge of the converted table bed beside him, her eyes drifting immediately to the canvas resting on the easel.

She stared at her own likeness—the raw intensity captured in every stroke. Then she looked over at him.

"She fought like hell to find you," she said, glancing toward the closed door. "Ran down to every slip as the rain beat down, cursing your name each time.” Her gaze shifted back to the portrait. "You always see me like that. Like I’m made of iron."

"You are," Patch said.

"It hangs by my bed…in the small apartment above the precinct." She didn’t need to say which painting. Or how much she cherished it—the small canvas of a thirteen-year-old pirate and an eleven-year-old beekeeper side by side.

Saint leaned her head back against the bulkhead, her eyes tracing the dark grain of the wood overhead as her mind went back. She thought of the old music room,  lingering echo of a piano key, and the memory of their first kiss—the only kiss they had ever shared. Yet their hearts had remained bound across twenty-six long years, even while the world pulled them apart—divided by his obsessive pursuit of Grace and the lingering shadow of Eli Aaron.

"Did you read it?" Saint asked quietly, her dark eyes finding his face, searching for something hidden in the quietness between them. "The letter from Grace. The hundred pages."

There was no tremor in her voice, only the need to know if any piece of his heart still belonged to the ghost he had spent a lifetime chasing.

Patch’s eye held hers, his answer steady and absolute. “If you’re asking if those pages have my heart… no. I don’t need to go looking for where I belong, Saint. I already know.”

Saint stared at him—at the fierce familiarity of his face, at his single open eye watching her, and at the worn patch covering the one he had lost so long ago. A sudden wave of grief, swallowed whole by resolve, washed through her. She thought of the decades that had slipped away like water. The endless tracking, the highway miles, the missing-persons folders—the only way she had survived the long waiting. She had always waited for the promise made in their youth to finally come true—that they belonged to each other, and that he would always find his way back to her. She wouldn't let any more time go by. Not another year, not another night.

She reached out, her hand slipping behind his neck to pull him close. When she kissed him, his lips pressed against hers— he remembered. This kiss held the faint, sweet remnant of that first hesitant kiss in the music room so long ago, but now it was reverent, heavy with the weight of every lost year, every unspoken truth, and every mile they had finally crossed to reach the other.