Page 8 of Fame & Chaos

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.