Chapter Two
Caleb
Once it was confirmed that Uncle Hux was one hundred percent my biological father, everything changed.
Colt stopped coming around.
At first, I kept expecting him to show up anyway. Every time headlights passed our house at night, I’d run to the window, hoping it was him. Every knock at the door made my chest tighten with hope.
But it never was.
And eventually, I realized he was staying away on purpose.
I missed him so much it physically hurt.
Worse than that, his absence made me resent Mum even more than I already did.
I loved her.
I still love her.
But when you give a lonely little kid something as life-changing as a father, only to rip him away weeks later, it leaves damage behind that never fully heals.
Part of me started hating the world after that.
Even once I recovered from the transplant and my health improved, that bitterness stayed with me. Because no matter how much better I got physically, Colt was still gone.
Looking back now, I understand why.
He needed space to repair things with Dee after everything Mum’s lie had destroyed, and unfortunately, that meant distancing himself from me too. I don’t blame him for that anymore.
But as a kid?
Yeah, I blamed everyone.
Hux started coming around more after the truth came out. He really tried to step into my father’s role, and he did his best. The problem was… he wasn’t Colt.
Colt made me feel like the center of his universe.
Hux loved me, but it always felt more cautious than that.
Careful.
Like neither of us quite knew how we were supposed to fit together yet.
Still, he tried.
And unlike a lot of men probably would have, he never walked away.
One of the first real promises he made me was that he’d teach me how to play guitar someday. And to his credit, he kept that promise.
For my eighth birthday, he bought me my first guitar, and I still remember the look on his face the first time he heard me sing while we were messing around learning chords together in the living room.
He looked genuinely shocked.
“You’ve got something there, kid,” he told me quietly afterward. “If you work at it, really work at it, you could be incredible one day.”
I held onto those words for years.
By then, Hux and Mum were officially together. Apparently, they’d been in love with each other for a long time, even before all the chaos happened, and once the truth came out, they finally stopped fighting it.
Hux moved us into a bigger house not long after.
A nicer house.
Warm.
Bright.
Somewhere that finally felt stable.
Then he moved in with us, and we were this weird little family trying to figure each other out.
It wasn’t bad.
Actually, most of the time it was really good.
Hux grew to love me in his own way, and over time, I learned to understand him too. He just wasn’t naturally affectionate the way Colt was.
Colt hugged people.
Hux knocked knuckles against yours or ruffled your hair before disappearing into another room—that was his version of love.
At first, it bothered me, but eventually I realized it didn’t mean he cared any less. Hux just wasn’t built soft emotionally. Years of addiction, fame, and self-destruction had roughened parts of him long before I existed.
Then, suddenly, he had a son.
A partner.
A family depending on him.
That kind of responsibility terrified him sometimes, even if he’d never openly admit it.
I once overheard him tell Mum he never planned on having kids. Not because he hated children, but because he didn’t think he’d be any good at it.
Honestly? I think he spent years terrified he’d fail me.
But he didn’t.
Not really.
Eventually, I started calling him Dad too, though deep down a part of me still ached for Colt in a way I never fully talked about.
Meanwhile, Mum and Hux tried for another baby a couple of years later.
To my complete annoyance.
I liked being the only kid of a rock star. I wasn’t interested in sharing the attention after spending most of my childhood sick and miserable.
But the pregnancies never happened.
And after a while, they stopped trying.
Eventually, they became happy with just me.
Hux and Mum got married not long after Annie’s fifth birthday party, and by then, I was twelve years old and finally starting to understand relationships in a way I never could as a child.
Mum loved Hux.
I truly believe she always had.
The problem was she loved Colt too, and somewhere in the middle of all that confusion, she hurt everyone involved.
From what Mum eventually explained to me, Colt had finally confessed he loved her not long after she’d slept with Hux during a rough patch in their relationship.
Mum panicked. She felt guilty, overwhelmed, and terrified of destroying the band while Colt’s career was exploding worldwide.
So instead of telling the truth, she ran, and then she found out she was pregnant with me.
Because she’d only been with Hux once, she convinced herself I had to be Colt’s son.
And that one mistake changed all of our lives forever.
If she’d checked properly from the beginning, none of the devastation with Dee and Colt would’ve happened.
Thankfully, they eventually found their way back to each other after the truth came out.
And I can’t imagine them apart.
The way Colt looks at Dee even now after all these years… it’s like nobody else exists when she’s around.
That kind of love is rare.
Messy.
Painful.
But rare.
And somewhere deep down, I think I’ve spent my whole life hoping one day I’ll find something that feels like that too.
After the transplant, things slowly started getting better.
Not immediately.
Recovery was brutal, and for a while everyone hovered over me like I might break if I moved too quickly, but eventually I got stronger.
Strong enough to run without collapsing halfway down the street.
Strong enough to kick a football around with Dad.
Strong enough to stay awake for hours playing guitar without feeling like my body was shutting down on me.
For the first time in my life, I felt normal.
And I’ll never stop being grateful to Nanny for that.
She gave me a future when she didn’t have to.
I know Dad struggled with not being able to donate because of his old drug use. Even years later, I could still see the guilt sitting inside him whenever the transplant came up in conversation. But if he could have given me that kidney himself, he would have done it without hesitation.
That’s the thing about Hux.
For all his rough edges, he loves hard.
As I got older, our relationship changed too.
By the time I hit my teens, we were less father and son and more like mates who happened to live in the same house.
He taught me how to play guitar properly, introduced me to old music, and spent hours jamming with me late at night when Mum had already gone to bed.
Those nights became some of my favorite memories.
Eventually, Colt came back around, too.
It took a long time before he could really look at me again, but he did eventually try, and I respected the hell out of him for that. He was more guarded after everything happened, nowhere near as openly affectionate as before, but underneath it all, I still knew he cared about me deeply.
The bond we’d formed in that short period of time never fully disappeared.
And now that I’m older, I’m glad things happened the way they did.
If I really had been Colt’s son, I don’t think he and Dee would have found their way back to each other, and if that hadn’t happened, Annie and Ella would never have been adopted. And despite how much those girls can annoy the absolute shit out of me sometimes, I can’t imagine my life without them.
Through all the chaos, though, there was always one constant.
Indi.
My Indi.
She stayed beside me through every hospital visit, every bad day, every emotional disaster that came with the mess between Colt and Dad. And honestly? She understood disappointment better than most adults.
Her parents were people with an addiction who cared more about drugs, festivals, and each other than they ever cared about her. Half the time, she practically raised herself while they disappeared for days on end chasing whatever high mattered more than their daughter.
I hated them for it.
Still do.
When I was really sick, Indi would sit beside my bed for hours telling me stories about magical kingdoms and made-up worlds where she was a princess, and I was the knight protecting her from dragons.
Sometimes we’d spend entire afternoons planning our futures instead.
Especially after I became part of the Slade family.
All of a sudden, the world felt bigger.
Limitless.
We’d talk about throwing huge parties when we were older and inviting all our friends, only to remember neither of us really had any outside each other.
Oddly enough, that never bothered us much.
Indi was fascinated by my new life. Going from poor and invisible to being connected to the most famous rock family in the world blew her mind a little. She used to tell me all the time that she knew I was destined for something bigger, and at the time, I thought she was crazy.
Now? Maybe she saw something in me long before I ever did.
I’d known Indi since first grade.
I was the weird, quiet kid everyone made fun of because I was tall, awkward, and sick all the time. Then Indi Malone marched into the classroom, told everyone to “Piss off,” and sat beside me like she’d known me forever.
That was it.
From that moment on, we were inseparable, and I never imagined a version of my life without her.
A little after Annie’s fifth birthday, the band started forming naturally among all of us kids. Annie, Ella, Aston, Chad, and I had basically grown up surrounded by music, so it was inevitable, really.
We started out messing around more than anything else.
But weirdly?
We were good.
Like… genuinely good.