You Can Hear It In The Silence

Chapter 25

"You know, I don't think staring at it will make it ring," Harry's mum said as she brushed past him to get to the oven. She'd been making the same joke for over a week now.

"Good thing I'm not trying to make it ring." He still didn't look up from his phone, though... in case it did ring.

"You could just call him."

He hadn't told her that he'd left Louis a voicemail almost a week ago and hadn't heard anything else. "I don't want to call him."

She sighed as he placed a chopping board and some potatoes next to him. "If you're going to stand in the kitchen, make yourself useful."

One-handedly he searched the drawer for a potato peeler.

"Harry!" His mum yelled.

He looked up from his phone. "What?"

"You're digging around in the knife drawer without watching what you're doing."

He rolled his eyes. "I'm going slowly, so I'm not going to slice myself open or anything."

"Put your phone down."

Groaning, he placed it down beside the chopping board but didn't lock the screen so he could keep reading. He did look into the drawer to find the peeler, though.

"If you're not wanting it to ring, what are you doing?"

Harry chewed his lip, debating whether or not he should tell her. His fear won out in the end, and he figured maybe a second opinion would help. "I think something's wrong."

"With what?"

"Louis," he said, the quiver in his voice surprising himself.

"I didn't know you were talking to him," she said, sounding surprised, which was fair because he wasn't talking to Louis.

"It's not that. It's just... the rest of them have been weird." He placed the potato peeler down, deciding it was a waste of time to pretend he was going to be able to stop scrolling through the past messages.

"What have they said?"

"It's more... I don't know. Kind of like more what they haven't said." Harry chewed his lip.

"What haven't they said?"

"They haven't said anything about him." Harry had scrolled back to the last time they'd mentioned Louis. It was ten days ago, just before they added Niall to the group. He slowly scrolled back down, making sure that he had caught everything.

He had his side to his mum, but he knew she was facing him, having stopped doing her own chopping. "Maybe they just don't want to make you sad or something."

Harry snorted. He didn't need them to talk about Louis to get sad.

"Well, sadder." Her voice was soft.

"Maybe..." Harry said. Stopping at messages from eight days ago. "At first, I thought maybe he was doing well or seeing someone or something, and they didn't want me to know. But they kept asking me to come home, so I don't think it would really make sense for them to keep that from me but still want me to come home where I'd find out."

"Have you asked them?"

Harry hummed.

"For goodness sake, just ask them if you're worried."

He pursed his lips. "If I ask, they'll think I care."

"I think they probably know you care, Harry," she said, using the same exasperated voice she'd used for the last three weeks. "And if they didn't know, would it be terrible if they did?"