Perfect
The thrilling, shocking and romantic sequel to the bestselling YA debut FLAWED is finally here. When we embrace all our flaws, that’s when we can finally become PERFECT…Celestine North lives in a society that demands perfection. After she was branded Flawed by a morality court, Celestine's life has completely fractured – all her freedoms gone.Since Judge Crevan has declared her the number one threat to the public, she has been a ghost, on the run with the complicated, powerfully attractive Carrick, the only person she can trust. But Celestine has a secret – one that could bring the entire Flawed system crumbling to the ground.Judge Crevan is gaining the upper hand, and time is running out for Celestine. With tensions building, Celestine must make a choice: save only herself, or risk her life to save all the Flawed. And, most important of all, can she prove that to be human in itself is to be Flawed…?
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First published in Great Britain by HarperCollins Children’s Books in 2017
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Copyright © Cecelia Ahern 2017
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Cover photographs © Shutterstock
Cecelia Ahern asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of the work.
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Source ISBN: 9780008125134
Ebook Edition © 2017 ISBN: 9780008125141
Version: 2017-02-20
For Yvonne Connolly, the perfect friend
Contents
PERFECT: ideal, model, faultless, flawless, consummate, quintessential, exemplary, best, ultimate; (of a person) having all the required or desirable elements, qualities or characteristics; as good as it is possible to be.
There’s the person you think you should be and there’s the person you really are. I’ve lost a sense of both.
A weed is just a flower growing in the wrong place.
They’re not my words, they’re my granddad’s.
He sees the beauty in everything, or perhaps it’s more that he thinks things that are unconventional and out of place are more beautiful than anything else. I see this trait in him every day: favouring the old farmhouse instead of the modernised gatehouse, brewing coffee in the ancient cast-iron pot over the open flames of the Aga instead of using the gleaming new espresso machine Mum bought him three birthdays ago that sits untouched, gathering dust, on the countertop. It’s not that he’s afraid of progress – in fact he is the first person to fight for change – but he likes authenticity, everything in its truest form. Including weeds: he admires their audacity, growing in places they haven’t been planted. It is this trait of his that has drawn me to him in my time of need and why he is putting his own safety on the line to harbour me.
Harbour.
That’s the word the Guild has used: Anybody who is aiding or harbouring Celestine North will face severe punishment. They don’t state the punishment, but the Guild’s reputation allows us to imagine. The danger of keeping me on his land doesn’t appear to scare Granddad; it makes him even more convinced of his duty to protect me.
“A weed is simply a plant that wants to grow where people want something else,” he adds now, stooping low to pluck the intruder from the soil with his thick, strong hands.
He has fighting hands, big and thick like shovels, but then in contradiction to that, they’re nurturing hands too. They’ve sown and grown, from his own land, and held and protected his own daughter and grandchildren. These hands that could choke a man are the same hands that reared a woman, that have cultivated the land. Maybe the strongest fighters are the nurturers because they’re connected to something deep in their core, they’ve got something to fight for, they’ve got something worth saving.
Granddad owns one hundred acres, not all strawberry fields like the one we’re in now, but he opens this part of the land up to the public in the summer months. Families pay to pick their own strawberries; he says the income helps him to keep things ticking over. He can’t stop it this year, not just for monetary reasons but because the Guild will know he’s hiding me. They’re watching him. He must keep going as he does every year, and I try not to think how it will feel to hear the sounds of children happily plucking and playing, or how much more dangerous it will be with strangers on the land who might unearth me in the process.
