Chapter 33
Khalee
It feels like we’re oceans apart.
Me. My parents. Kaze. Mada.
Everything is different now.
They say the truth sets you free, but then why do I feel like I’m drowning?
Why does it feel like I’m stuck beneath the surface, lungs burning, the world muffled and just out of reach?
Out of all the storms life has thrown at me, I swore, swore, that nothing could be worse than that night.
Turns out, I was wrong because this time, I can’t pretend it didn’t happen.
Funny thing is, I got exactly what I prayed for.
I begged for someone to see me.
I begged for a way to let go of the weight I’ve been carrying for years.
I begged for Kaze to come back. And he did.
But for this? For this ending?
To lose my sister.
To love a boy who’s already dead.
To learn that everything, all of it, was built on jealousy, lies, and something so much darker than I ever imagined?
It’s been three weeks.
Three weeks of learning how to breathe again in the aftermath of a storm that nearly killed me.
Three weeks of pretending I know how to exist in this “after.”
The silence after the chaos is not peaceful; it’s deafening, and no one tells you that the moments that change your life forever… are usually followed by ones that try to quietly destroy you.
My parents think I don’t hear them.
Kaze thinks I don’t always see him.
But I do.
I feel it in my bones.
How it’s breaking them. How none of us came out of this whole. And I can’t stop the guilt from spreading.
I can’t stop this feeling that my heart broke in a way that can’t be put back together, because after something like this… how does any relationship survive? Blood or not.
In the silence of my apathy, my mind won’t shut up.
It runs through every memory, hunting for signs.
Looking for where I did something wrong.
When I could’ve done better.
When I should’ve been a better sister.
Was it that fight we had when we were fifteen, over a phone I broke by accident?
Or was it when I wore her Linkin Park sweatshirt without asking?
Maybe it was the time I told our parents she smoked, thinking they already knew.
Or when I said no to yet another party, because I was tired and didn’t feel like pretending?
Was that when I lost her to whatever was growing inside her?
Was that the moment I stopped being her sister and became the monster in her story? The threat?
“Hey, love. Do you need help with anything?”
His voice pulls me back into the present.
I blink, eyes focusing on the mirror above the sink. The girl looking back at me doesn’t quite feel like me yet.
Too pale. Too still.
Like I’ve been carved out and only the shape remains.
I inhale slowly and glance at the door. He’s standing just outside it, like he always does.
Close, but never pushing. Ready, but never rushing me.
I guess today’s the day I see light again.
After days of therapy, of doctors watching every inch of me like I might disappear, they decided I was ready for a bit of air.
Fresh air.
Sunlight.
So I’m released for a couple of hours to go to the garden terrace on the top floor of the hospital.
My parents offered to come with me, but I had to refuse.
They mean well. They always mean well, but the idea of being flanked, hovered over, loved so tightly it starts to make me feel like I might suffocate…
I know they’re scared. I know they think if they loosen their grip even slightly, I’ll slip through their fingers for good.
But I need to breathe. I need to find myself again. And to do that, I need space.
Or, at the very least, all the space I can get… besides him.
Because even when I tried to push Kaze away, yelled at him, ignored him, told him to go, he stayed.
He never left.
Not when I broke. Not when I spiraled. Not when I wasn’t easy to love.
He stayed like some kind of lifeline I didn’t ask for but couldn’t live without.
And the worst part? The part that keeps me up at night? My brain, my own mind, keeps trying to convince me he’s not real.
Because he’s dead.
He died. But he’s still here.
So what does that make him?
What does that make me?
I rest my palms on the edge of the sink and meet my own eyes in the mirror again.
I look… haunted. Just barely alive.
To be honest, I look more like a ghost than he does. And that’s saying something.
I close my eyes, trying to will myself to wake up, because my head feels foggy, and I’m terrified that when I finally open my eyes, he’ll be gone.
Just a trick of my trauma.
A fragment of a broken mind trying to survive.
But he doesn’t vanish.
He insists on being here.
“I can see you thinking, love.” His voice is low, steady. He leans into the doorway, head tilted, green and deep eyes fixed on me.
“You real?” I ask, barely above a whisper.
“As real as I can be, K.”
And that letter, K, guts me. Only he ever called me that.
“Don’t float behind me like that. It’s creepy, ” I mutter, trying to cover the way my hands are trembling while trying to mask the rising confusion in my chest.
“Sorry, ” he murmurs. “Just making sure you’re okay.”
I nod. I’m not. Not really. But I nod anyway.
Then I turn to him, arms limp at my sides, useless.
“Do you think I’m… a bad person?” I ask.
His smile drops.
“No.”
“You hesitated.”
“I didn’t.”
“You paused.”
“I didn’t, love.” His voice is firmer now. Unshaken.
I look down at my hands that I can’t seem to make stop shaking, and of course, he notices it.
“Come with me, ” he says, reaching out. His hand, still just air, moves toward mine. He tries to hold it, but in this form, he can’t.
“Where?” I manage to ask.
He smiles gently.
“Just follow me,” and I do.
The elevator ride is slow. Too slow.
The kind of silence that hums in your ears and makes your skin itch.
Kaze stands beside me, not quite touching, but close enough that I feel him like static.
When the doors open with a soft chime, morning light spills inside.
It’s warmer than I expected.
We step out onto the rooftop garden. The space is larger than I imagined.
The garden stretches out across the top of the building, ringed by tall glass panels for safety but still open enough to let the sky in.
The air up here smells different, cleaner. Softer.
There’s a path made of pale stone winding through patches of wildflowers and carefully trimmed hedges.
Benches are scattered between trees in oversized planters, offering shade or sun, depending on where you sit.
A few people are here already, nurses on short breaks, visitors sipping coffee from paper cups, two patients sauntering, like the air itself might break them.
Everyone is spaced out, like the garden understands the need for quiet and distance.
I shuffle forward in my hospital robe and slippers, the sun warming my skin like it hasn’t in weeks.
Kaze doesn’t speak. He just walks beside me, guiding me gently through the space, like he knows where I need to be better than I do.
We reach a wooden bench near the edge of the terrace, half in shadow, half in light, facing the horizon, and we sit.
Not touching.
Not speaking.
Just… there.
The city stretches out below us, distant and hushed.
Birds wheel lazily overhead.
The world keeps moving, but for the first time in what feels like forever, I breathe, not the shallow, surviving kind of breath, but a real one. One that fills my lungs and settles, instead of getting stuck in my throat.
The silence between us isn’t empty.
It’s full.
Of questions. Of history. Of everything we’re still too scared to say.
“You were always terrible at dates, anyway, ” I add, eyes still fixed on the skyline. “After all, the only date we ever had was me… inviting you out.”
I don’t know why I say that, but… seems like the only thing able to get out of my mouth.
There’s a pause.
He doesn’t laugh.
“I always wanted to give you more, you know?”
His voice is quiet, measured, but I can hear the ache under every syllable.
I realize too late that in trying to ease the weight between us, I only ended up digging into the wound we both carry.
His death.
“I don’t doubt that, ” I say, just as softly. “Not for a second.”
He exhales slowly, gaze still on the horizon.
“And you have to believe me when I say I’d give anything, everything, to change it. To be alive again. Or better yet… to have never died at all.”
I know that.
I really do. And the worst part is… I feel guilty for forcing him to say it out loud again.
He already told me everything, on a night not long ago when I finally found the strength to speak. To ask.
At first, he hesitated. Maybe because I was still—am still—fragile.
Maybe because it hurt him to talk about it just as much as it hurt me to remember the tragedy our love turned into.
But I pushed.
And he resisted. Until, eventually… he broke.
Right there in front of me.
And I just sat in the wreckage with him, holding what was left.
Of him. Of us.
“We can’t change the past, Kaze.”
“I know, ” he says. “ And that’s why I need you to stop trying to rewrite it in your head.”
I turn to look at him.
His face is still. Steady.
But his eyes flicker with something heavy. Something fragile.
“What happened, ” he continues, voice low, “with me, with Mada… none of it was your fault, Khalee. You didn’t cause this. You didn’t choose this. You were just standing too close when we set fire to ourselves.”
I blink hard. My chest aches like something inside me is splintering.
“I just…” My voice breaks. “I keep going back, trying to find the moment I could’ve changed everything. Saved her. Saved you.”
“You did save me. More than once.”
“Not when it counted.”
“No, because you couldn’t. You were the one counting on me, on us, to save you, and we failed you.” He says it gently, like it hurts him to speak the truth.
Then he leans in, eyes searching mine.
“I don’t have it in me to justify what your sister did.
Not for a second. But we know she’s sick.
Really sick. And there’s nothing you could’ve done to fix that.
Just like there was nothing more you could’ve done for me because everything that happened to me was due to my choices, love.
My own need to self-destruct.” He pauses, lets that land.
“So stop carrying that weight like it belongs to you because it doesn’t. It never did.”
I swallow hard. My throat feels raw, and my tongue is like sand.
He’s looking at me now with everything he can’t say written across his face, like he’s begging me to let this truth reach the part of me that still wants to bleed for everyone else’s sins.
“Having someone like you in our life was a privilege none of us ever deserved, ” he says, voice thick with everything he’s holding in. “You deserve to be free of our burdens, Khalee. You deserve peace, even if it takes time. Even if it hurts.”
I nod, but the tears have already started, quiet and relentless, like they’ve been waiting for permission to fall.
“You deserve peace, too, ” I say.
The words slip out before I can stop them. And the second they do, I see the shift in his face.
The way his expression softens. Cracks. Breaks wide open.
“I think… my peace is you, love.” His voice trembles. “That’s why I found you after all that time lost in the dark, because you were always my light. My heaven on earth. And I’m not ready to leave you.”
I squeeze my eyes shut, like maybe if I don’t look at him, this won’t hurt so much. But it does.
God, it does.
“You know what I mean, Kaze, ” I whisper. “As much as it kills me to say it, you know. You remember who you are now. And that means something. That matters. You need to find your answers. You need to be free.”
And there it is.
The truth.
Laid bare in the open air between us.
And it feels like handing him the knife and asking him to cut the last string.
It hurts more than anything I’ve ever felt.
Fuck, it hurts.
The tears are pouring now. I don’t stop them. And neither does he.
Because he knows I’m right. And I know he doesn’t want me to be.
“I love you, Kaze, ” I sob. “I really do. I never got the chance to say it before, God, I should’ve said it so many times, but I’m saying it now.
Because I can’t let you step into whatever comes next without knowing it.
Without carrying it.” Then I close my eyes.
“But keeping you… keeping you here with me… isn’t fair. ”
For a moment, there’s only the sound of the wind, and the weight of goodbye trying to find its shape between us.
“I love you too, Khalee, ” he whispers, and it breaks something final in both of us. “I always did, love.”
We don’t speak again, because we both know that, even against our deepest desire, our story is coming to an end, and the happy ending we should have had cannot exist in this reality.
Maybe one day.
Maybe in another life.
Maybe in the afterlife.
But not now. Not like this.
So we just stay there, two souls side by side on a hospital rooftop, and we cry.
For the life we lost. For the love we had. For the goodbye we both know is coming.
And for the first time since he came back to me… I start to understand what letting go really means.