Cyn’s House

Silence became the loudest thing he had ever lived inside. Somehow, in the wake of everything, the noise of absolutely nothing outsung the sound of anything he’d ever heard before.

It pressed in on him from every corner, dense and ringing as if the air around him had weight. After all of the yelling - all of the tears, sharp insults and edged words - the relentless noise in his head, he longed for it. No cicadas humming. No trees bristling. No stark reminders that the world kept spinning while his had halted completely. Pure, uninterrupted quiet. All he needed was time to himself. Time to digest. Time to process. Just get to the car, he thought, clinging to it like a lifeline. 

But when his back hit the leather seat, it wasn’t familiar. The smell wasn’t his. The steering wheel didn’t feel right in his palms. It was a car that he didn’t recognize, just like the life that didn’t belong to him. Rented, temporary, and untethered. The driver’s side door came to a close and the silence sealed itself in around him, complete and utterly merciless. He’d gotten exactly what he asked for and realized it wasn’t what he wanted. 

Everything operated strangely after that. Time felt like it moved differently all night - hours felt like minutes, minutes felt like hours. Stretched before collapsing on itself.  It warped the weight of what had been dropped in his lap. It bent the air inside the car as it sat there, idle and unstarted in the driveway. The eerie blanket of completely quiet made it feel obscured, like tasting static. 

The radio remained off.  His fingers didn’t drum the steering wheel. He didn’t roll the windows down or hum to himself to keep his mind busy while he sat at a red light, the way he always did. Another small habit to keep his thoughts from turning inward. There was nothing to fill this space that was only built to hold silence. Twenty seven minutes of unbearable silence. 

Every so often, his hands froze before his fingers flexed involuntarily, as if his body needed proof it was still alive or useful - as if sensation had to be forced back into them. They were the same hands that waved to a sea of faces under stadium lights. The same hands that wrapped around microphones, steadied the neck of a guitar or used to meet the curve of Anna’s waist like it was reflex. Hands that never held his own child during her first few moments on earth. That truth followed him all the way back to the hotel. Heavy and relentless, settling deeper into his bones with each stretch of another mile. So he drove in silence.

The drive ended the same way it started - finding himself sitting somewhere he didn’t want to be. Time had somehow fused itself together. Or stopped completely. He wasn’t sure. He couldn’t remember if he’d been driving for 15 minutes. 30, maybe. An hour, perhaps. All the same. The time on the dashboard clock was telling him it was half past 10pm. He didn’t bother to look at the time when he’d pulled out of Anna’s driveway. In fact, he didn’t remember pulling out of the driveway at all. No memory of putting his foot on the gas or shifting back into drive. Did he even stop at red lights? Miles disappeared beneath him without asking to be remembered. The noise in his head was so busy he couldn’t seem to recollect how he’d gotten here. 

Harry stared through the windshield for a long moment after pulling beneath the hotel's awning, hands still wrapped around the steering wheel long after the engine had gone quiet. The silence wafting in the car clung to him as stubbornly as the ache in his chest. He wasn't sure what he was waiting for. Permission, maybe. Or the impossible hope that if he sat there long enough, he'd wake up and discover none of it had happened. He closed his eyes for a second - lids wound tightly shut as he sucked in a deep breath. When he opened them, he’d be somewhere else. 

In bed, where he could just get up and abandon this bad dream amidst disgruntled sheets. The morning light filtering through curtains. Disheveled sheets twisted around his legs after another restless night. Maybe even a text from Mitch asking what time they were leaving. Or scolding him for running late. Coffee. A quick, hot shower. Anything but this. Anything but a world where he'd learned, in the span of an evening, that he had a four-year-old daughter he'd never known existed. 

His lungs emptied as he opened his eyes. Nothing was different. A sharp rap loud rap of knuckles against the passenger’s side window splintered the silence, instead - jerking his shoulders almost on instinct. There was a moment he nearly forgot where he was, the soft glow of the hotel exterior lights lulling him into recollection.

A navy-blue name tag caught his eye first, faintly lit by the warm glow pooling beneath the maroon-colored awning. His gaze followed upward until it reached the face behind the window - the valet, who couldn't have been older than twenty-three. Sandy hair in messy curls peeked out from beneath a neatly fitted cap. A polite, practiced smile settled easily across his round face. It was the kind of smile worn by someone who greeted hundreds of strangers every week. There was an openness to the kid that only belonged to people who still believed every interaction was ordinary. A luxury Harry yearned for as he rolled down the window.

"Evening, sir." he said through the glass, cheerful enough that you could almost ignore the fact it was forced. 

Harry blinked. It took him a second longer than it should have to remember how to respond. The words reached him, but they seemed to arrive from somewhere impossibly far away. He looked at the earnest kid for a beat whilst his expression remained blank, as though he'd forgotten where he was. Like he had no idea what came after someone greeted you.

The smile lingered for another second before uncertainty crept in around its edges. It faltered minimally, the corners of his mouth tightening as his eyes flicked over Harry's face, searching for some sign of recognition or response. A faint crease formed between his brows, confusion settling in as he hesitated, clearly unsure if he'd been heard at all. The valet shifted his weight, brow lifting a little more noticeably now, his polite composure wavering just enough to reveal his uncertainty. Harry watched as his body leaned in towards the car, fingers flexing on the edge of the window. 

“Do… you want me to park the car, sir?” 

“Right.” Harry nodded quietly as if the valet pulled the thought right from his head. “Yes - yeah, thank you.” 

His fingers, slim and fable, fumbled loudly as they fished the set of keys out of the cupholder beside him. Amidst it all, he could feel the weight of the valet’s stare heavy on the crown of his head. When he looked back up and offered the keys over the passenger seat, the young man offered another polite smile. It was smaller this time, gracefully touched with the careful patience people reserved for strangers who looked like they'd had a difficult night. Harry wondered if it was that obvious.

“No problem!” The valet chirped, wrapping the keys in his palm before scurrying to the driver’s side of the car. 

Harry nodded absently, already somewhere else again by the time he pushed open the driver's door. He was met with the whipping of humid Georgia air, which wrapped around him as he stepped beneath the hotel's awning. For a brief moment he simply stood there, watching the valet slip atop the leather seat and situate himself behind the wheel of the rental car. It struck him then how effortlessly the kid had known what to do next. It felt like a luxury Harry could no longer afford, and he wallowed in that thought as he watched the tail lights of the car blur into nothing. 

The heavy glass doors opened before he reached them, releasing a rush of chilled air that chased away the thick Georgia humidity still clinging to his clothes. Inside, the hotel gleamed.   

Cream-colored marble stretched endlessly beneath his feet, polished to such a high shine it reflected the warm glow of crystal chandeliers overhead. Gold accents caught the light at every turn. They framed oversized mirrors, lined the concierge desk, traced the edges of towering floral arrangements that looked as though they were replaced every few hours. Somewhere out of sight and deeper in the lobby, a pianist drifted lazily through an old jazz standard. Every note dissolved into the soft murmur of conversations and the faint clink of crystal glasses from the hotel bar.

The details reached his eyes but never quite settled in his mind, sliding past him without any meaning. He could've been walking through the grandest hotel in the country or the lobby of another airport Hilton for all he cared. His body moved forward because it knew it was supposed to, not because his brain had told it to.

People lingered everywhere.

A couple leaned shoulder to shoulder over drinks, laughing quietly between themselves. A businessman wheeled a carry-on toward the elevators while absently loosening his tie. A young family crossed the lobby with a sleepy little girl draped across her father's shoulder, her tiny hand curled around the ear of a well-loved stuffed teddy bear. Harry's gaze caught on them. Only for a heartbeat.

Long enough to watch the father instinctively adjust her weight against his chest without waking her. His own chest tightened. Four years. Four years of moments that ordinary. Four years of reaching for a child who already knew exactly where she belonged. His feet kept moving. He lowered his head before anyone could catch his expression.

"Mister Styles," a voice greeted warmly, the Southern drawl softening each syllable. "Good evenin'. Welcome back." 

The younger brunette from earlier, the one who'd spent the afternoon swiveling lazily in a creaky desk chair trying to invent ways to entertain himself during the lull between check-ins, had long since gone home. In his place sat a woman pushing sixty, if he had to guess. Her silvery hair was gathered into a loose twist at the nape of her neck while thick-rimmed glasses rested low on her nose. She looked up from her computer, her face immediately brightening the moment she recognized him. 

Harry slowed just enough to acknowledge her. But, involuntarily, his chin just dipped in an automatic nod. The corners of his mouth twitched into something that could’ve passed for a smile if someone wasn't looking too closely. He could've stopped. Could've asked how her evening was going. Thanked her. Wished her a good night the way his mum had spent years insisting decent people ought to do. The words were there somewhere. He knew they were, he could feel them. He just couldn't seem to reach them right now. Instead, he kept walking.

His lips pressed into a thin line, his gaze drifting somewhere beyond the concierge desk, beyond the lobby, beyond the hotel itself.

A father.

The words appeared again without permission. Not a singer. Not a son. Not a brother. Not the same man who'd sat at the kitchen island in Anna's parents' house, entirely sure that he fully understood the shape of his own life.

A father.

The title felt impossibly foreign and horrifyingly familiar all at once, like trying on a coat that should've belonged to him years ago. A bellhop maneuvered an empty brass luggage cart around the corner, offering Harry an easy smile as he passed. Harry nodded back automatically.

I'm someone's father.

The thought struck harder that time. Not someday. Not one day. Already. For four years. And somehow, impossibly, the rest of the world continued exactly as it had before. The all too familiar, mundane habit of trudging down another hotel hallway. Loitering impatiently in front of the elevator while awaiting its descent, pressing the button again as if it’ll somehow expedite its trip to the lobby floor. 

He could hear the elevator mechanics grinding together faintly before the doors opened up. In the split second that existed before the doors parted, he hopelessly prayed that it’d be empty. The idea of ascending to the 15th floor with company made the knot in his stomach twist a little harder. 

The empty carriage felt like the first break he’d caught all day. He wondered, if someone else was packed in here beside him, what they would think of him slamming the button to the 15th floor four separate times before manically hitting the ‘close doors’ option on the bottom of the panel. He was the only one in here, and he desperately needed it to stay that way. 

The elevator climbed in complete silence, save for the occasional mechanical hum as it eased past another floor. He held his breath with each floor that passed, saying a silent prayer that the carriage didn’t grind to a stop to give refuge to another hotel guest.

Harry stood alone beneath the recessed lighting, his reflection staring back at him from every pane of brushed steel that lined the cab. He caught glimpses of himself from every angle. Staring back at him, he had resorted to nothing but bloodshot eyes, shoulders pulled tighter than usual, curls fallen haphazardly across his forehead. He hardly recognized the man looking back.

A soft chime announced the 15th floor. The doors parted with practiced ease, revealing a hallway washed in muted amber light. Plush burgundy carpet swallowed the sound of his footsteps as he wandered toward his room, the corridor stretching endlessly ahead in perfect symmetry. Every identical door looked as temporary as the last, each one housing strangers with lives that would remain blissfully untouched by his own. He wondered if anyone else behind a closed door was burdened with problems that mimicked his own. 

"Oh my God... did you just see who that was?" a voice whispered, not nearly as quietly as its owner had intended.

It was a bleak reminder and a harsh reality check. He wants to just disappear, which is almost impossible given who he is. The concept of this hotel hallway becoming another place where he has to be ‘Harry Styles’ felt like a burden too heavy to carry. He isn’t even sure who that person is right now. The fame has never felt more insignificant. Usually fans remind him of his career, his accomplishments. Tonight, none of that mattered because the only identity he can think about is the one no one else knows. The one he couldn’t even bring himself to say out loud.

Another answered almost immediately. "Just leave him be. It's late."

Yes, Harry thought wearily. Just leave me be. Tonight, more than any other, he couldn't bear the thought of being perceived. If someone stopped him now - asked for a photograph, an autograph, exchanged the kind of harmless small talk he'd spent years navigating with practiced ease - he didn’t think he could manage to survive it. That carefully rehearsed smile. The genuine gratitude. That outward version of himself that belonged to everyone else. He wasn't certain he could keep the thoughts from spilling out.

I have a daughter.

The sentence had begun living just beneath the surface of everything, scratching relentlessly at the back of his throat, begging to be spoken aloud if only to prove it was real. Still, he could feel their eyes following him from somewhere behind. Curious. Hopeful. Wondering if they'd made the right identification. He kept his head lowered. Shoulders squared. Body angled just enough to signal what his mouth wouldn't.

Please don't.

The familiar weight of being watched had never felt heavier. By the time he reached his door, relief had settled so deeply in his chest it almost hurt. His key card slipped into the lock. A flash of green. A quiet mechanical click. It was the first thing all evening that had gone exactly as expected.

He threw one foot inside, then another. The door swung shut behind him with a muffled thud, severing the warm glow of the hallway in a swift, single motion. Darkness swallowed the room whole, wrapping around him before his eyes had the chance to adjust. Harry stood motionless just inside the doorway. He drew in a long breath through his nose, but it left him slower than it entered, collapsing from his lungs in something that sounded dangerously close to surrender. 

Only then did he reach for the wall, fingertips trailing blindly across cool textured paint until they found the light switch. Instead, he stood motionless just inside the doorway, allowing the darkness to swallow him whole. It settled over his shoulders like another layer of clothing, concealing the room from view and, for one fleeting moment, asking nothing of him.

His trainers remained laced tightly to his feet. The middle button of his shirt still fastened atop his chest. The mint green suitcase sat picked through at the foot of the bed, reminding him of how he picked it apart earlier in the day for the right clothes to wear. Reminding him of how he’d gone to Anna’s with entirely different expectations of the outcome. 

He couldn't bring himself to move. Every action between leaving the Wilson’s driveway and arriving here had happened on instinct alone. Pressing the auto start button to the rental car. Merging onto the highway. Handing his keys to the valet. Smiling (if he could even call it that) at the eager looking concierge. Riding in the elevator. Walking the endless hallway to his room. Each one had been another task. 

Another distraction. Another excuse to put off the moment when there would be nothing left to occupy his hands, leaving only his mind to address its thoughts. His thumb brushed absentmindedly over the light switch, soon followed by a gentle click. Warm light spilled across the room all at once. Each bulb above him chased the darkness into the corners, exposing the familiar anonymity he'd stupidly hoped wouldn't be there.

The air conditioner hummed steadily beneath the window, its mechanical drone occupying the silence without ever quite interrupting it. Crisp white sheets stretched taut across the king-sized bed, untouched, every corner folded with impossible precision. It was not the same restless, anxiously distraught pile of sheets he’d left behind hours earlier. 

His wedding suit lay abandoned across the ottoman where he'd thrown it off the night before, the jacket slipping lazily over the edge as though it had collapsed under its own weight. Beside the bathroom door, his suitcase sat lopsided and half-unzipped, one polished dress shoe still tucked neatly inside while its mate rested several feet away where he'd carelessly kicked it off after the reception.

Aside from a freshly made bed, nothing had changed. The room looked exactly as he'd left it, only now it felt painfully unfamiliar. Like it belonged to the blissful, unassuming version of himself who had walked out of it hours earlier. The version who still foolishly believed he understood the shape of his own life. Who understood exactly who he was and what he wanted.

The physical world remained frozen while his internal world became irrevocably altered. The room hadn’t changed. Georgia hadn’t changed. He was changed. Harry let his eyes drift slowly from one corner of the room to the next, taking inventory of everything except the thoughts he'd spent the last few hours outrunning. There was nowhere left for them to hide. 

He threw his wallet on the TV console, missing it entirely and wincing a bit as it landed on the carpet with a thud. His eyes rolled next to his suitcase, where they pondered the idea of sifting through it for a clean pair of sleep shorts. The effort required to unzip it, to pull out a change of clothes, to begin the ordinary routine of ending a day suddenly felt impossibly disproportionate. There had been a version of him this morning who would've showered without thinking. Hung his clothes neatly in the wardrobe. Set an alarm. Maybe answered a few texts before bed. That man had completely checked out just after sunset. 

Harry wandered farther into the room without any real destination, his fingers absently grazing the edge of the dresser before finding the back of the desk chair. He pulled it out just enough to sit, only to think better of it. The bed looked inviting until he glanced at it, then it became suffocating. Even the silence intertwined with the whirr of the air conditioning seemed restless, pressing against his ears with a weight that made the room feel smaller than it was. 

His gaze fixated, instead, on the wedding suit draped carelessly across the ottoman. Twenty-four hours ago, that suit had been arguably the most important thing hanging in the room. He'd worried about wrinkles. Whether the tie sat straight. Whether Anna would look at him. It held the faintly remaining scent of a shared cigarette. Deeply engrained in the fabric were memories of a few shared laughs, sobering questions, the slight hint of potential. 

Now it looked absurd. Fabric. Thread. Buttons. The longer he looked at it, the more he felt his stare harden and burn with resentment. How could something that had consumed so much of his attention that morning suddenly feel so meaningless? He couldn’t even bring himself to look at it anymore.

His eyes drifted toward the mirror above the dresser before he caught himself. He wasn't ready to look. Instead, he found himself staring through the window, beyond his own faint reflection mimicked sloppily by the room lighting, to the parking lot several floors below. Cars came and went beneath pools of amber light. A couple crossed toward the entrance, their laughter muted by the glass. Somewhere in another room, someone let out a burst of laughter loud enough to carry through the walls before it disappeared just as quickly.

As cruel as it felt, the world had continued without asking his permission. His life, however, had not. And he’d be remiss to recognize that the life he’d known before would likely never look the same again. Which made his jaw tighten. The anger returned as suddenly, and profoundly, as it had left.

Absent-mindedly, his thumb slipped beneath the leather band of his watch before he'd consciously decided to take it off. The buckle came undone with practiced ease, the same familiar movement he'd repeated thousands of times over the years without a second thought. He turned it over once in his palm, glaring down at the shiny silver before setting it carefully atop the dresser. 

The face still ticked. Second after second. Minute after minute. It hadn't stopped. Time never did. It didn’t wait for anyone, and it passed threateningly. Whether he wanted it to or not.

His eyes lingered on the sweeping hands longer than they should have. With a lump in his throat, he carried on watching them continue their slow, indifferent path around the dial. The longer he looked, the more it frustrated him how completely unmoved it was by the fact that his entire world had come undone somewhere between one rotation and the next. It was sickening how such an inanimate object was seemingly taunting him from the palm of his hand.

Four years. The number sounded manageable for a moment. That is, until he tried to hold it in his mind. Instantly it became impossible. Four years wasn't a number - it was time. Time measured in ordinary Tuesdays and hurried breakfasts. In bedtime stories read for the hundredth time because children never seemed to tire of hearing the same ending. In scraped knees that healed, baby teeth that loosened, red marks carefully and quirkily marked against kitchen walls to count growth spurts. Four years wasn't something you counted. It was something you lived.

Or, in his case...Something he'd missed.

His throat tightened again. Constricting and releasing in short spurts. Somewhere wrapped within those four years, Charlie had learned to laugh. Someone had discovered that ticklish spot that sent her into breathless giggles. She'd learned to clap, to wave, to point at things she wanted but couldn’t yet find the words for. Someone had witnessed every one of those moments. Someone had laughed with her. Cheered for her. Picked her up after she'd fallen. Soothed her back to sleep after a bad dream. It just hadn't been him.

His fingers curled instinctively against the edge of the dresser. He wondered what her voice had sounded like before she could pronounce words properly. Like how she pronounced the word ‘yellow’ or ‘spaghetti’. He thought fondly of the idea of her babbling endlessly in that language only babies seemed to understand. Did she reach for Anna the way every child instinctively reached for the person they trusted most? Eventually his thoughts brought him somewhere else. To a place where he considered a moment - one brief, confusing moment - where she'd looked around the room in search of someone she couldn't quite name. The thought stopped him cold and invited a queasy feeling to the pit of his stomach.

He closed his eyes to try and ward it off. No, he decided, she wouldn't have. How could she ever know to miss someone she didn’t even know existed? That realization alone hollowed him out in an entirely different way. It wasn’t because she'd forgotten him, but because she'd never been given the chance to remember him. He was likely never even a forethought. 

His gaze returned to the watch as it continued ticking, unaffected and completely unrelenting. He found himself thinking now about every hour he'd spent crossing oceans. Every late-night interview. Every encore. Every airport terminal. Every hotel room that blurred into the next. He'd measured his life in departures, seas of people as blurred faces, boarding passes, vacations, unmoored responsibilities. Meanwhile, somewhere between Georgia and New York, a little girl had been measuring hers in birthdays and firsts. He’d fallen short of his biggest responsibility of all, and he didn’t even have a clue. 

The watch suddenly felt heavier than it had any right to. He picked it up again, turning it over in his hand. Four years. One thousand, four hundred and sixty-one days. Thirty-five thousand and... he stopped counting. The mathematical gymnastics were meaningless. No equation in the world could accurately calculate the gravity or magnitude of lost time.

Tucked away in his pocket, deemed as an afterthought for the bulk of today, his phone buzzed. It twitched against his thigh, the thin barrier of fabric between his phone and his bare skin buzzing faintly. Like it needed to urgently remind him of its imperative existence. 

Upon fishing it out reluctantly, Harry only stared at the lock screen. He squinted against the sudden wash of harsh blue light as if it had done something to offend him. Notifications sat stacked one atop the other, ordinary and absurd in their urgency and completely forgotten. A handful of ignored emails. A slew of unanswered texts. One from Gemma, another from Jeff. Someone else following up about a call he’d forgotten he was supposed to take. Someone else asking when he was flying home which, in turn, elicited a bitter laugh. As if, at this point, he had any idea. As if he had even thought that far ahead. The world, of course, still needed things from him. Then he saw his mother’s name.

Landed. I’ll call you when I get home. Love you. X

Something inside him lurched so violently it absolutely terrified him as his thumb froze over the screen. For one unbearingly gruesome second, he was no longer trapped in  his thoughts  within the four walls of a hotel room in Georgia. In that fleeting moment, he was just a little boy again - caught in limbo between needing his mother and not knowing how to explain what hurt. The muscles in his throat constrained again with a force that made him swallow hard once, then again. Neither time seemed to help. The message on the screen blurred slightly before he blinked it clear. His own mother didn’t know.

No one knew. Not a single friend. Not Gemma. Not his mother, who had grown quite attached and poured love into Anna once with the easy, open affection she tended to give people she believed might become family. His mother had no idea she had another granddaughter.

Harry seemingly lowered himself squarely into the desk chair before he even realized he’d moved at all. Everything felt off kilter as the room seemed to tilt strangely around him. The carpet felt soft beneath his feet, the air conditioner kept humming on as though nothing about the shape of the universe had shifted. His phone remained firmly gripped in his hand. Anne’s message still glowed menacingly back at him. Innocent, unaware, and all too unbearable.

How was he supposed to tell her? The question struck with such tenderness, such sudden brutality, that it nearly ripped through the anger entirely. How was anyone supposed to make that kind of call?

How was he supposed to answer that call, which he knew would come sooner rather than later, and segway into this revelation. Small talk about the wedding, a few lighthearted jokes about the airport, a recap of an otherwise eventless few hours aboard a plane. She’d ask in a tone that masked any trace of meddling how returning Anna’s ring went. Which, ultimately, he’d answer with the ground-altering sentence, Mum, I have a daughter, that would elicit a deafening silence on the other end of the phone. How would he find answers to the questions she’d surely ask him? Likely to be questions he still had unanswered as well. How could he fathom that discussion without imagining the hurt in her voice when she realized she had missed four years too? Four years of birthdays. Four years of photographs. Four years of tiny dresses and first words and sleepy morning curls. Four years of getting to know someone that was just as much a part of her, too. 

He could only picture his mother going eerily quiet. That, to him, was the worst part. Not crying or gasping. Just meet his declaration with a devastating stillness of a mother trying to be strong for her son while something inside her quietly cracked. His hand tightened around the phone until the edges bit into his palm. And then, beneath the grief, the anger came back. It crept up on him slowly at first before crashing down all at once. His mother should have known. He should have known.

There should have been a phone call. A message. A letter. Fucking something - anything. There should have been one single moment in the last four years where Anna looked at their daughter - looked at a face that held a strong resemblance to his own adolescence - and decided he deserved to know she was alive. That there was a father out there that belonged to her the same way she belonged to him. A father that would’ve given up anything if it meant gaining her instead.

His thumb moved instinctually before he could stop himself, feverishly moving to open his messages. Before he could even recognize what he was looking for, he found his fingers busy typing Anna’s name. As a result, the old thread appeared like a bruise he’d forgotten how to stop touching. He hadn’t deleted it, and he hated that about himself.

For years, he’d convinced himself it meant nothing. That it was only there because deleting it felt dramatic. Because he wasn’t the kind of person who scrubbed someone from his phone like they had never existed. He had kept it because some part of him had never been brave enough to let the last proof of them disappear. He had kept it with a deeply buried, silent hope that one day they’d be answered.

The most recent messages sat at the bottom, exactly as he remembered them. A missed call. Another one two days later, sent directly to voicemail just as the first had. Then the text.

Can we talk?

Three stupid words. Still green. Still unanswered. Followed by another hauntingly green bubble. 

I don’t want to leave things that way. When you’re ready to talk, I’ll be here.

Both messages still sat there, frozen in time with all the humiliation of a hand extended into empty air. Like so many times before, Harry stared at them until his vision sharpened around the edges.

He remembered sending each text message. Remembered standing outside a studio with one shoulder pressed to a brick wall, the city moving loudly around him while he watched the screen like it might change if he wanted it badly enough. He remembered trying to call her first. Once. Then again. He recalled the physical feeling of disappointment upon being immediately sent to voicemail. The hesitance of leaving a message, but quickly hanging up instead. He didn’t know what to say. He’d nearly convinced himself to try for a third time, so sure that the first two didn’t count because his hands had been shaking and he hadn’t known what he would say if she answered

But she hadn’t. The calls never went through. The messages never turned blue. Maybe it was denial, or his brain creating something out of reflex to shelter his fragility, but he had told himself she’d changed her number. Eventually, he had forced himself to come to terms with the fact that she had blocked him. He’d let that explanation settle where the wound was because it made sense in the cruelest way. Anna had wanted him gone. Anna had shut the door. And, in turn, Anna had made sure there was no vessel for him to knock anymore.

But now, staring at the old green texts, that assumption curdled into something sharper before taking on an entirely new shape. She had known then. She knew when he called. She had known when he reached, however clumsily he did it, back toward the wreckage of them. She had known there was something more than heartbreak sitting between them, something alive and growing within her. A beautifully devastating fuse of him and her. Yet, still, she had stayed unreachable.

No, worse. She had willingly, intentionally, made herself unreachable.

Harry’s jaw clenched so tightly it hurt. In light of recent events and a crushing new reality to be faced, it woefully dawned on him that a changed number was not an accident. Silence that complete, that calculated was not passive in any capacity. Disappearing that thoroughly took effort. It took planning and willful, precise intention. It took waking up day after day and deciding that the father of his child would remain exactly where she’d left him - behind the slammed door of a once happy home.

The phone lowered slowly into his lap while his anger pulsed through him - nowhere clean to go. It was too tangled with disbelief. Too tangled with grief. Too tangled with the memory of Anna’s face in the yard, pale and stricken and defensive, as if he had been the one who’d forced the truth out of hiding by daring to ask the wrong question.

How had it taken until tonight? The thought struck him again, wider this time, expanding beyond Anna until it filled the room and swallowed him whole. How had she managed to get by this long without this being known? How had he managed to live four years on the same earth as his daughter, growing and existing right under his nose, and he never caught even a whisper of her?

He rattled off all the things he’s done throughout the course of his career - the larger half of his entire life - and found himself circling. He had been photographed buying coffee. Photographed leaving gyms. Photographed outside hotels, inside airports, walking too close to someone, standing too far from someone, wearing a shirt people decided meant something it didn’t. Strangers online from far and wide could (and have) build entire mythologies out of a ring on his finger, a lyric, a glance, a blurry background reflection in somebody else’s Instagram story.

And yet, amidst all of that, Charlie had existed. Not as an idea or a rumor, but as a child. His child. A little girl with a name, with a face that favored his own many moons ago, with a laugh that replicated her mother’s. She had existed for this long and somehow there had been nothing.

No grainy photos of Anna with a precocious bump tucked beneath a sundress or poking out of a shirt. No leaked photo of Anna with a baby on her hip in some grocery store parking lot. No anonymous comment buried beneath a fan account. No blurry picture posted by someone’s cousin’s friend with a caption full of question marks. No internet theory ever strange enough to reach him or garner any traction. No cryptic murmur from a mutual friend who had heard something and thought he ought to know. Tried as he may, he can’t even come up with a memory of ever seeing a photo of Anna anywhere with even so much as an inkling or reference to Charlie. And he was sure he’d scoured every corner of the internet by now. Enough to have at least remembered. 

Not even suspicion, just four years of total silence. It was almost impressive. Which, in turn, only seemed to make him angrier. The longer he thought about it, the less it felt like luck and the more it felt like architecture. Anna had not only kept a secret. No, she had managed to build an entire life around keeping it.

Family who knew not to say his name too loudly. Siblings who offered an impenetrable ring of secrecy and familial protection. Friends who knew what not to ask and topics to steer clear from. A small, southern hometown that understood and practiced privacy as a form of unwavering loyalty. A daughter raised beneath the protective cover of marshland, church mornings, closed gates, and southern manners sharp enough to keep strangers from peering too closely. 

And Harry had been everywhere. All this time - painfully, publicly, and ridiculously reachable. Out in the complete open yet, somehow, still tucked away in the darkest corner of Anna’s thoughts. In a box with no lock or key. 

Anna could have found him if she wanted to. That was the part he couldn’t stop turning over. There had been lawyers. Managers. Friends. Email addresses. Even an instagram DM, if she was truly amiss of all other routes. His mother. God, his mother. If Anna had wanted the truth to reach him, she could have sent it in a hundred different directions and one of them would have surely found him.

But she chose none. Every single day, she chose none. Every morning Charlie woke up, Anna knew and still chose none. Every birthday candle blown out, each one marking another year that had passed, Anna had a plethora of options and still chose not a single one. Every fever, every first word, every new tooth, every nightmare, every little shoe tied by the door, every bedtime story read beneath a soft lamp, every moment where Charlie became more herself, Anna knew there was someone out there who had no idea what he was missing. The most agonizing realization of it all was how she willingly, and continuously, let him miss it.

Harry looked back down at the phone, where his mother’s text still waited on the screen - small and loving and completely unaware. It was too much to face at the moment, so he pressed his thumb against the side button until the screen went black. To his dismay, the darkness reflected his own face back at him.

The reflection was haunting. He looked at the tired, stricken, angry person hollowly staring back at him. The reflection of a man with a daughter. The reflection of someone’s son who had to call his mother and tell her she was a grandmother four years too late. The phone sat heavy in his hand as though the weight tripled with each thought that swirled in his skull.

For years, he had mistaken Anna’s silence for the end of their love story. Tonight, he understood it had also been the wall built around the beginning of his daughter’s life. It was enough to prompt him into throwing the phone onto the bed, watching it land face down atop the crisp hotel duvet. He couldn't bring himself to look at it anymore.

Not at the unanswered messages. Not at the conversations that had simply... stopped. Not at the impossible realization that somewhere buried beneath years of ordinary notifications and forgotten reminders, his entire life had quietly rewritten itself without him even knowing. The room suddenly felt too warm, too stuffy and overbearing. Or maybe it was him.

As if to subdue the uneasiness embedded across his entire body, he dragged a hand over his face. The scrape of stubble was rough against his palm before he forced himself to his feet. Each movement of his body took place before his brain had a moment to catch up with the decision. His legs managed to carry him toward the bathroom with the slow, heavy gait of someone who had been awake for several days instead of a few hours.

The light above the vanity blinked once before flooding the small room in a sterile, blinding shade of white. Everything existing inside of the lush ensuite bathroom remained painfully untouched. Fresh towels folded with crisp corners. Tiny bottles of shampoo lined neatly along the marble countertop, a few of them adorning the shower shelf. A bar of soap wrapped in paper that promised lavender and eucalyptus, as though either could fix what the day had broken.

Harry immediately leaned forward, bracing both hands against the cool stone, where his head hung between his shoulders and his eyes closed. It didn’t matter what corner of the hotel room he retreated to, the anger was still there. It hadn't softened. If anything, it had become heavier. 

Anger at Anna. Anger at himself. Anger at every mile he'd driven believing the hardest thing he'd ever lose was her. He laughed once beneath his breath, cynically and empty. If someone had told him yesterday morning that by dusk he'd be informed of a four-year-old daughter that was half his, he would've called them insane. He would’ve laughed uncomfortably. He would’ve shot them a sideway glance and dismissed them. Now the sentence lived inside him as comfortably as his own name.

I have a daughter.

He said it out loud once, voice hoarse and low. Then he said it again. This time, it was more clear. Ultimately he rolled his eyes and shook his head. It didn’t matter how many times he said it aloud, it still couldn't make it sound or feel even remotely real.

His hands found the buttons of his shirt almost absently, working downward one at a time. The fabric slid from his shoulders, soon followed by the thump of his belt as the buckle met the cool tile of the floor. His shorts followed, then his socks. Each article of clothing landed somewhere behind him in a disarray with little more than a soft whisper against the floor. He wasn't undressing. He was shedding the day. He was shedding every insult thrown at him, and from him. He was trying to peel off remnants of what he was sure would turn out to be the most emotionally agonizing night of his entire life. 

At least, that’s what he was trying to do. No matter what he got rid from his body and threw to the floor, the weight stayed exactly where it was. Heavy on his chest, and even heavier on his mind.

The shower roared to life with a violent, relentless rush of water. Steam gathered almost immediately, curling upward in lazy ribbons before swallowing the room inch by inch. Harry stepped beneath the spray without testing the temperature. Heat struck his shoulders first, then the back of his neck. It poured over him unforgivingly, soaking his hair until it clung to his forehead, running in steady streams down the planes of his chest and disappearing beneath his feet.

He stood perfectly still, succumbing to the water as it hammered against him hard enough to sting. If anything, he welcomed it. It offered itself as something tangible to feel besides the ache in his chest and the throbbing at his temples. Minutes passed, or maybe only seconds. He wasn’t entirely sure. Time had become impossible to measure.

He scrubbed shampoo through his hair with more force than necessary, fingertips digging into his scalp until the skin almost felt raw. Soapy clumps lathered in bunches across his skin before disappearing down the drain in cloudy, fizzled out ribbons. He stared down at the drain, watching it spiral away. The simplicity of it all felt almost uncomfortable. Wash. Rinse. Gone. If only grief and anger managed to obey the same rules.He tipped his head back beneath the spray and squeezed his eyes shut. Like the haunting whisper of a ghost, Anna's voice found him right away.

"I wanted to tell you."

The words echoed and bounced between his ears with perfect clarity, as though she was standing behind him in the confines of the shower and whispered them directly into his ear instead of shouting them across a backyard hours earlier. Then another.

"It was you, Harry. Just you."

Then came another.

"I didn’t mean to keep this from you for so long."

Each sentence landed exactly where the last one had, striking the same wound over and over until he wasn't sure where the pain ended and the numbness began. He threw one palm flat against the tiled wall as if to steady himself. As if touching something palpable in front of him could subdue the sound of Anna’s voice piercing his thoughts. His breathing turned uneven.

"Fuck."

The word escaped through his lips before he’d even realized he said anything. It wasn't loud, or even angry. It sounded tired. Flat out, bone-deep tired. 

He stayed beneath the water until it began to run cooler. His fingertips wrinkled into a shrewd state and his skin flushed pink beneath the relentless heat that had long since stopped feeling warm. Nothing had changed.

He abruptly shut the water off, inviting the silence to return all at once, where it had begun to ring louder than the shower ever had. Harry reached blindly for a towel hanging on the rack just outside the curtain, lazily dragging it over his hair, then his face, before wrapping it low around his waist. Steam still hung thick in the air, following him menacingly as he stepped back toward the bedroom. 

The bathroom mirror was masked beneath a veil of fog, but he stopped in front of it anyway. For several long seconds, there was nothing staring back at him but a blurred outline. Featureless and unrecognizable. Without warning, his hand lifted almost without thinking, a flat palm sweeping slowly across the glass. It left behind a clear path that emerged through the dense layer of condensation. He gave it another pass until his reflection began taking a human shape. First his eyes, followed by his mouth. Then the hard line of his jaw came into focus, and Harry was left to do nothing but stare at himself.

He had looked into thousands of mirrors over the years. Backstage mirrors rimmed with bright bulbs. Hotel mirrors. Studio mirrors. Bathroom mirrors in cities he'd forgotten almost as soon as he'd left them. Every single time, he'd known exactly who was looking back. Tonight it was like staring at the reflection of a complete stranger. The man in the mirror had the same green eyes. The same curl to his hair, fighting to take form beneath heavy droplets of water. The same dimple in his cheek. He was sporting the exact same face he'd woken up with that morning. Yet somehow he felt entirely unfamiliar.

Because sometime between leaving this hotel and returning to it, everything had changed and flipped itself upside down. His entire life. He searched his own reflection as though the answer might be written somewhere across it. Nothing looked different, no one passing him in the hallway would've known. The concierge hadn't. The valet hadn't. The couple laughing by the elevators hadn't. To every stranger he'd crossed paths with tonight, he was still Harry Styles. Singer. Celebrity. Guest in room 614. He was the only one who truly knew that none of those titles sat at the center anymore.

Somewhere, fast asleep in a blissfully peaceful state beneath the same Georgia sky, was a little girl who shared his smile, his blood, his family. A little girl who was a living, breathing piece of him. A little girl who had unknowingly rearranged every piece of his identity without ever even meeting him. He wasn’t looking at the man he'd been that morning. He’d likely never see the face of that man again. Right now, staring back at him through the reflection of a mildly foggy mirror, he was looking at someone’s father. Her father.

The realization should have, by every accord, filled him with joy. Instead, it hollowed him out. Fathers wrapped their children’s tiny hands in their big, protective ones as they crossed busy streets. They placed band-aids upon scraped knees. They read bedtime stories in silly voices and carried sleeping children from the car without waking them. They knew their daughter's favorite color. Her favorite breakfast. The stuffed animal she couldn't sleep without. All in all, Harry knew absolutely none of it. He had become a father in the cruelest possible way - without a single memory to prove it or show for it.

His eyes burned again, but not with tears - with helplessness. No matter how long he stood there, no matter how hard he stared into the mirror searching for the man he was supposed to become, he could never look back at the father Charlie should have known from the beginning. That man had been stolen out from under him long before Harry ever knew he existed.

His jaw tightened until it ached. The helplessness didn't stay helpless for long. Instead, it hardened. It unfolded slowly at first, like cooling metal, until grief gave way to something far more dangerous: anger. It reappeared again, this time more Raw. More unrelenting. It surged through him so suddenly he felt himself flexing and unflexing his hands, his knuckles growing whiter each time. Four years. Even now, after grappling with it for so long, the number had become even more unbearable. Not because it was large, but because it felt so full. 

Full of all the moments that had belonged to someone else without ever asking for his contribution. Someone else had carried Charlie through the grocery store when she grew tired halfway down the cereal aisle. Someone else had crouched beside her after scraped knees and whispered that she was alright before brushing the dirt from her tiny palms. Someone else had listened to her laugh herself breathless over something only a four-year-old could possibly find funny. Someone else had tucked blankets beneath her chin at night, then checked beneath the bed for monsters. Or held her hand crossing busy parking lots. Someone else had become the person she instinctively reached for when she was frightened.

Harry squeezed his eyes shut. Those weren't just milestones, those were glimpses into a fatherhood he never got to partake in. A plethora of quiet, ordinary moments no one thought to photograph because they merely happened every day. The type of moments that built a relationship through one bedtime story, one breakfast, and one hug at a time. And the most gruesome part of it all was just how badly he had been robbed of all of them.

The word settled heavily inside him like a rock at the bottom of a body of water. Robbed. He wasn’t forgotten. He wasn’t just excluded. He was robbed. Choices had been taken from him before he'd ever been allowed to make one. Before he even knew there were choices like that he had to make. His breathing grew shallow as the thoughts jumbled together. Anna had decided. It wasn’t a choice they made together. Not after a conversation. Not after giving him the chance to fail. She had looked at the future of their daughter, looked down at the sweet face of a newborn wrapped contently in a hospital blanket, and decided she already knew what kind of father he would've been. The image of it all made his pulse thunder manically in his ears.

His reflection stared back at him through the clearing mirror, equally exhausted and equally furious. Maybe Anna believed she'd done the right thing, he thought. Maybe she truly thought that, by choosing this route, she'd be protecting Charlie. Maybe she'd convinced herself that shutting him out had been the safest choice for everyone. He didn't know. He wasn't ready to know, and at this point, he didn’t care. He wasn’t looking to be understanding of the decision. He didn’t even have the capacity.

Tonight, right now, all he could see were the years. Each one she had decided belonged to her alone and claimed for herself. His chest rose with one slow breath. Then another before he looked back at the man in the mirror.

The years behind him were gone, and there was nothing he could say or do to get those back. Lost time was cruel and unforgiving like that. There was no amount of anger that would give him Charlie's first steps or her first birthday. The first time she reached for someone's hand. The first time she whispered "Mama." or the potential first words of “Dada.”. Those memories had slipped beyond his reach forever, and that was that. But tomorrow wasn't hers to decide by herself anymore. The thought settled over him with a surprising kind of calm as he tracked his steps earlier in the evening to Anna’s invitation to dinner. 

She could be angry if she chose to be. She could slam every door in that house if she wanted to. She could shoot him down. She could remind him of every mistake he'd ever made, every fight they'd ever had, every reason she'd convinced herself he didn't belong. She could do her worst and throw every fuck up in his face. She could, as she always had, keep that unwavering wall up through stoicism and spite. He would listen. He would answer. He would fight if he had to and scale that wall at any cost. Whatever guilt, hurt feelings, or shame it came with, so be it. Because for the first time since he'd walked out of her backyard, he understood something with perfect clarity. 

This wasn't just about him anymore. This wasn’t about a fractured relationship. This wasn’t about his feelings for Anna, or vice versa. In fact, it wasn't even about Anna at all. It was about a little girl who had spent four years growing up without ever being given the chance to know her father. He had already lost enough, and he refused to lose tomorrow or any day after.

Harry held his own gaze for another long moment before finally looking away. For the first time all evening, the uncertainty loosened its grip. He still didn't know what he was going to say. He still didn't know how Anna would react. He didn’t even have a working phone number to call and preface his appearance tomorrow. He still wasn't sure if Charlie would smile when she saw him again or hide behind her mother's legs.