After the End: Book 3

73. Siblings

Louis POV

As the afternoon wore on I felt more and more anxiety at the prospect of Harry's abandonment. I had settled for believe he wasn't in danger. Or at least he wasn't in any more danger than he normally was with his current way of life. That didn't make me feel any better. If he was safe then it was hard not to believe he was intentionally bailing to hurt us. Was this it then? He was going to do it this way?

"So what do we do?" I asked Becca quietly. We were in my living room, sitting opposite to eachother on the sofa. We'd been sitting in silence for a while. Harry had popped up in Manchester again and his phone had been on for a while tracking him apparently walking somewhere but it was gone again. We were just sitting in silence waiting for one of us to come up with a solution.

"I think we just need to wait," she said for the hundredth time.

"We should just cancel it!" I insisted.

I was referring to the performance the following day. I didn't want to wait and bank on the possibility of his showing up. We were cutting it too close. We couldn't trust him.

"Louis, we can't cancel it yet," Becca stated calmly. "We have to give him a chance to show up."

"If he doesn't show up, then this is all over anyways!" I snapped.

I felt my face growing red and I knew I was at the tipping point. I was going to freak out. I was already freaking out but I felt like I was going to have a nervous breakdown. Every single thing I'd been holding together the entire summer had been tepid. I had things by threads and my threads were about to dissolve.

"Everything's going to be okay," Becca said again soothingly. She grabbed my hand and looked up at my worried face. "We still have time."

"Time for what? To hope he shows up? We have to cancel before the last minute," I urged her.

"If we cancel and then he shows up, he's going to think we gave up on him," she reminded me. "And you're the one that said we couldn't give up."

I had told her that. I'd said it multiple times. The morning that I called her while sending the email, we'd talked for a long time. I'd laid out everything. I'd told her everything I could think of pertaining to reigning in Harry and that had been at the heart of it. If we show Harry that we believe the lie, he will crumble. He believed himself to be doomed. If we acted like he was right, he'd have no reason to consider anything different.

I took a deep breath and put all of my energy into believing in him for a moment. It felt crushing. It felt impossible. It was irrational to put hope in him when he was so actively pushing back against it, but I did it anyways.

"He'll show up," I agreed quietly. My voice sounded weak. "He'll come back."

Becca nodded encouragingly. A few weeks prior when Harry had come back from the states acting so out of control, she'd been absolutely overwhelmed by him. The moment I'd asked her to step up, she'd done everything I asked. I couldn't fathom where she'd pulled the ease from. She was professional and collected always, but the hopefulness was something she'd mustered almost specifically for me. I couldn't get enough of it.

Then Daisy walked into the room hand in hand with Oliver. Behind her in the entryway to the hall, Phoebe hovered behind. She was eyeing me with something nervous and something else. She looked upset, if not a little unsettled. Daisy looked similarly concerned. She paused a few feet away and stared at me, releasing Oliver's hand.

At the sight of them, I leaned away from Becca and dropped her hand in the same childish way I'd been maintaining. Oliver wandered up to me oblivious to any tension there may have been. He climbed up to the sofa to sit next to me with a smile and started babbling quiet nonsense. I looked away from him at the girls.