Ugly Perfections

Chapter 40 #2

Three Months Later

That was the last time I ever saw Kai Oren Steele.

They took him to the hospital that night—bloodied, unconscious, barely alive. He slipped into a coma within hours, and for a time, I believed we’d lost him for good. The doctors weren’t sure if he would wake.

Still, I came. Every day. I sat in those sterile waiting rooms that smelled like old coffee and antiseptic, with books I didn’t read and letters I would never get to send.

But Gabriel never let me see him.

He wouldn’t even look at me. Wouldn’t answer my calls, my messages. And when I tried to visit, he’d already left instructions at the front desk. Do not allow Adeline Ross upstairs. I remember the nurse’s face—she had been kind. Apologetic. Like she wished she could do more.

But there’s no winning against a grieving father.

So I waited. In the hallway. In the parking lot. Sometimes just in my car, watching the windows of Kai’s room flicker through the blinds, hoping to catch the silhouette of something, anything. But I never did.

And then, he was gone.

Three weeks after the crash, every news article, every headline, had been about him.

KAI STEELE DISAPPEARS FROM PRIVATE REHAB FACILITY

FROM PRODIGY TO PARIAH: THE TRAGIC FALL OF KAI STEELE

A GENIUS GONE MAD?

Security footage showed him limping through the back exit of a facility just outside the city. No one stopped him. No one knows how he even made it to the door. One moment, he was there. The next, he wasn’t.

Some say he died not long after.

Some say he’s still out there somewhere, under a different name.

Some say he went mad and then died.

As for me?

I like to believe that whichever ending was his, it was one where he was finally free.

Free from the eyes. Free from the noise. Free from the name.

But the truth is, no one knows. And something tells me no one ever will.

Kai Oren Steele was never heard from again.

They’ll write stories about him, but they’ll never tell the truth. They’ll paint him as a god or a devil, because no one dares to admit that he was just a boy who bled like the rest of us.

And Kai was never just a boy to them.

He was a legend. A prodigy. A name. A product.

They wanted him to be the tragedy they could romanticize. The myth they could own. The broken genius who burned too bright, too fast, and fell exactly how they expected him to.

But Kai wasn’t any of those things.

He wasn’t lightning in a bottle. He wasn’t poetry. He wasn’t some gilded thing meant to sit on a pedestal. Or in a cage.

Somewhere along the way I think those two things might have become the same thing.

He was just a boy.

An angry boy. A resentful boy. One with too many wounds and not enough places to put them. A boy who was told, over and over, that brilliance would save him, when all it ever did was isolate him.

But of course, no one will ever know that.

They won’t guess. They won’t care. To the world, Kai Steele was cruel in the way that only the extraordinary can afford to be.

But I know better.

Kai was cruel, yes, but he was also art. And people forgive art for being cruel.

He had the kind of beauty that made people forget the ruin underneath. The kind of brilliance that made people overlook the blood on his hands, the cracks in his voice, and the grief that lived just beneath his skin.

The truth was that Kai Steele was never built for the life they forced on him.

And I don’t know where he is now.

I don’t know if he’s alive, or dead, or something in between.

But I hope—god, I hope—that wherever he is, he’s somewhere quiet.

Somewhere no one calls him genius. No one calls him a god. Or a golden boy.

Just Kai.

Just a boy.

That’s all he ever needed to be.

The world feels duller now that he’s not in it. Or more specifically, not with me.

But there are times… times when I swear, I see him. At my mother’s funeral; at Will’s, too. At a fancy café where he was half-shadowed by a hanging plant, sunlight touching the bridge of his nose as he ate a croissant.

And every time, I would stop and stare. But he would only rise, collect his coat, and leave. Always before I could get close enough. Once, I even followed him, stumbling through a crowd, but he was too quick, or maybe I was too slow. And by the time I reached the door, he was gone.

Lilia told me she was convinced I was going mad. Seeing things that weren’t there. But then Christian admitted he’d seen him too. Liam said the same.

And it’s worse, somehow-knowing it isn’t only me.

It’s awfully depressing, thinking about it all. About Kai in general. I remember I had a conversation with Christian about it all recently.

“Do you think he ever really cared? Or loved us, even a little bit?” I had asked him.

He had stared at me for a long time before answering.

“To tell you the truth, Adeline. I really don’t know at all.”

He looked away then. “I think if he did, he buried it deep enough to never hear it scream.” He had said it like it hurt. Like it haunts him still.

The words stayed with me, and I think of them whenever I think of him.

I’d think maybe that’s all Kai ever did—bury things. Hide them. Build walls so high not even he could climb out again.

And I’d think maybe we were fools to love him anyway.

Aside from that, the past few months have felt astronomically, excruciatingly, dull.

Because of the funerals, mostly. There were too many of them. Too close together. Will. Paris. My mother. Even Anderson, though I didn’t attend that one. None of us did.

People grieved differently. Some lashed out. Some disappeared. Some of us, most of us, just tried to stay afloat.

No one’s really been the same.

We spent Christmas and New Year’s at Liam’s house. Just us: Lilia, Bea, Kym, Liam, Christian, and me. It was as fun as it could have been, I guess. Mostly, we sat around a table and looked through the pictures Will had taken on that stupid fancy camera he was always carrying around.

Photos of us mid-laugh, blurry in motion, candid and chaotic. A few of Kai who was serious in some, but soft in others. One of Paris that Christian almost threw into the fireplace, but didn’t.

No one said what we were all thinking.

That this might be the closest we’d ever get to having them back.

My favourite photo was the one of Kai leaning against the tree, reading and smiling. He had just looked so… peaceful. I still look at that picture sometimes and wonder if that was the last time he’d ever smiled like that.

Speaking of that tree, it’s dead now.

The one in Kai’s Garden. The one we used to sit under. Its branches are brittle now, hunched forward. I hadn’t really noticed how sick it looked until I asked Sue about it, a few weeks back.

“Has it always looked like that?”

“Since the first winter,” she said finally. “Got bent too young, I suppose. Never grew right after.”

A pause.

“Still tries, though.”

Some days, I’m scared I’m forgetting. Their voices. The exact tilt of Will’s grin. The gold ring in Kai’s eyes.

Grief has this terrible way of turning faces into fog, whether you want them to or not.

Healing feels a lot like forgetting, and forgetting feels too close to betrayal. But I keep going anyway.

Lately, it’s been a struggle. Though not all of it.

Kym’s awful stepfather was arrested thanks to Sterling, and the rest of us (mainly Liam) who spilled the beans about what he was doing to her and pushed her to tell him.

She lives with him now. Sterling, that is.

As for me, I found my guide to overcoming loneliness. After years of thinking it was gone for good, it showed up again. Tucked inside the pocket of an old coat I hadn’t worn in forever. I don’t even remember putting it there.

Miraculously, it was in perfect condition. It looked exactly the way I remembered it—maybe even better.

In other words, it looked taken care of.

Aside from that, I still work at the café sometimes, but less than I used to.

Just a few shifts here and there with Camille, who always saves me the last almond croissant when she can.

Rick’s still grumpy as ever, but I think he cares in his own weird, protective way.

He keeps the jukebox on when I close alone, and he doesn’t ask questions when I stare at the same register screen for ten minutes straight.

I even went with Elliot once. Cody was there too, of course. He and Elliot are a nightmare together—a loud, chaotic, reckless nightmare—but it’s… good. It’s nice seeing Elliot smile again, even if it’s not the same smile he used to have.

At the bookshop, Edna has finally warmed to me. I think. She even offered me tea once, and we talk more than we used to, and I’ve realized I quite like her company.

I reconciled with my sisters, too. Or something like reconciliation. It’s not perfect. It’ll never be what it was. But we’re trying. Or maybe I’m trying. I don’t think I’ll ever get back what I lost with them, but I don’t do it for them.

I do it for me.

Because some peace—I realize—is built, not found.

Right now, I’m just studying. For exams. Hoping I can scrape enough together for a scholarship. Christian offered to help with the money, but I refused.

Mostly because I don’t want to lean on him more than I already have.

I want to do this on my own. I need to.

Maybe that’s what surviving looks like now.

Not moving on. Not forgetting. Just… doing the next thing. And then the next. Building peace out of splinters.

When Liam texted, I was halfway through a practice paper. He had made it sound like an emergency, so I ran.

And now I’m standing on his doorstep, breath fogging in the cold air, heart thudding. I knock, hard—once, twice, three times—and just when I think I’ll knock again, the door swings open.

Ava stands there; arms crossed over her chest.

“About time,” she says.

I double over, panting. “I ran here!”

She gives me a once-over, eyes sweeping from my windblown hair to my untied shoelaces, then exhales like I’m the most exhausting thing she’s seen all day. “Follow me,” she says, turning on her heel.

Liam’s house is massive—more like a country manor than a home—but I’ve been here enough times that I don’t get lost in it anymore.

I know the way the floor creaks by the piano room, the way the hallway light flickers if you don’t hit the switch just right.

I know the scent of the place (amber wood and lemon cleaner) and the softness of the rugs.

But as we move through the entryway, I pass the clock.

That clock.

Tall and old and so unnecessarily elegant. It’s the kind of thing you’d expect to see in a museum instead of someone’s house. It’s stood in that corner for as long as I’ve been coming here, ticking like a heartbeat through every silence. It used to be loud. Distracting, almost.

But now…

I stop.

Ava walks on, not noticing, but I stand frozen in front of it, stunned. I touch the clock’s face lightly, as if it might wake. But it remains silent. I had never realized how loud the beating was—not until it was gone.

I let my fingers fall away, and then I follow Ava.

We make our way toward the living room, but as soon as we reach the doorway, I hesitate. The room is dark. Completely dark. No lights. No candles. Just shadows folding in on themselves.

“Ava?” I murmur.

But before I can say anything else, she flips the switch.

And the room explodes into light.

“Happy Birthday!” a chorus of voices shout from behind a long table piled with snacks and decorations.

Streamers dangle from the ceiling, gold and silver balloons bobbing just above the fireplace.

There’s a big, uneven banner strung across the wall that says HAPPY BIRTHDAY ADDIE in bold, mismatched letters.

One of the D’s is upside down. The second A is falling off.

It’s perfect.

I blink, stunned, rooted to the spot.

And then Ava turns to me, tucking a strand of hair behind her ear, her voice almost shy. “Happy birthday,” she says.

Something inside me softens, and I smile back. My first real, genuine smile in a long time.

I step into the room, slowly, and Liam is the first one to reach me. He grins and places a glittery birthday hat on my head. It’s way too small, the elastic pulls at my jaw, but I don’t care. I let out a breath of a laugh that turns into a hiccup, then something else entirely.

Tears.

Before I even realize I’m crying, Bea is pulling me into a hug. Along with Lilia, who wraps her arms tightly around both of us. And after that, Bea even manages to get Christian to join.

Kym stands just behind them, awkward as ever, but her eyes are soft. Liam’s parents are here, too, waving gently from across the room.

Someone cares.

They all care.

“You did all of this?” I manage, wiping at my cheeks with the sleeves of my jacket.

Bea steps forward, holding a cupcake. “Of course we did. You only turn eighteen once.”

“And don’t worry,” Lilia adds with a small smile, “we didn’t try to make you a speech or anything cringe. Mostly.”

“Speak for yourself,” Liam says, holding up a wrinkled sheet of paper. “I had five pages ready.”

Kym laughs, and it’s the most emotion I’ve seen from her in months. “We burned it.”

Liam pouts. “Rude. You’re always so mean.”

I stand there in the middle of it all, my throat tight, eyes stinging. No one has ever done this for me before. Not once.

“You okay?” Christian asks quietly.

I nod. “Yeah. I just… I’ve never had a birthday party.”

The room quiets a little at that.

Bea touches my arm. “Well, it’s about time, then.”

We talk for a while. We laugh. I cry again. But then, through the chatter, a voice begins to sing.

Soft at first. A little shaky.

“Happy birthday to you…”

I turn toward the sound—and stop breathing.

My sisters are standing in the doorway, each holding a candle on a homemade cake that looks like it’s already beginning to lean sideways. It’s messy. Lopsided. Covered in pastel frosting and uneven piping. But it’s beautiful.

It’s ours.

My throat tightens as they walk toward me, still singing, and place the cake gently on the table.

It has my name on it.

“Make a wish,” Naomi whispers.

I look around at the people who stayed. The people I love. The people who helped me crawl out of the dark.

I close my eyes.

And I wish, not for something new, but for more of this.

More of what’s real. What’s messy. What’s mine.

I open my eyes.

And blow out the candles.

Someone cheers. I think it’s Liam. Or maybe Lilia. Kym’s already reaching for a knife to cut the cake, muttering about how we’ll need a spatula to keep it from falling apart.

And I catch myself smiling.

Because for the first time in a long time, I don’t want to be anywhere else.

Not back there, in the dark. Not ahead, in whatever comes next.

Just here.

The moment isn’t perfect—we’re all still struggling. Still fighting. Healing.

But maybe that’s the point. Because nothing is ever what it seems, not even perfection.

And if ruin can shine, if loss can last, then maybe all we ever had were ugly perfections.