Family Ties

Last Thing

Harry's POV

I woke up before my alarm went off, looking down at Hannah asleep in my arms. She looked at peace, her hair softly draped over her face as it rested on my chest. I reached up and brushed it over her shoulder, running my fingers over the soft skin of her arm. I'd missed just laying with her, being close to her, watching her sleep. We'd spent most of the night making love, losing ourselves in each other as we reconnected in a way that we hadn't in a while. So much had been going on, and the last thing I wanted to do was try to initiate sex when she was going through so much, but I had missed it. I had missed her.

I'd done my best to reassure her that everything would be okay, but I'd be lying if I said that I didn't worry a little more with every day that passed and she still didn't show any emotion. I knew a little something about bottling things up, and it appeared that that's exactly what she seemed to be doing. It was hard to watch, knowing how desperately she wanted to feel something but just couldn't. I knew that every day that passed without her being able to feel anything was just compounding the effect it would have once she finally could.

I'd never felt so helpless, knowing that at any moment it would hit her and there was nothing I would be able to do about it. I'd been doing my best to just be supportive, to help us both settle into the new life we'd found ourselves living, but I'd be lying if I said I didn't feel alone in it sometimes. In a lot of ways, Hannah seemed to be shutting down emotionally, closing herself off to everyone around her, and the worst part was that I knew she didn't even realize it.

I slowly untangled her limbs from mine, placing a soft kiss to her forehead as I peeled myself out of bed and headed to the shower. I was hoping she'd be able to sleep in and get a good night's rest with the house to herself, I knew she hadn't been sleeping well and I knew she could use a solid rest.

I had a ton of paperwork to catch up on with all the time I'd taken off recently, and I had to get into my office so I could finally get on top of it. I'd been doing my best to catch up and not stay at work too late, but I was used to doing paperwork at home and it had become nearly impossible to get anything done with the twins running around. I finally had to put the real office I'd set up a year before to use, which was an adjustment in itself. With how quickly the business had grown over the past few years, Liam and I had decided we'd needed to have an actual office building for the employees we'd had to hire to keep up with the business side of things. I'd had to hire people to help out with various aspects of the company to free me up to focus on the major things I only trusted myself to do.

I'd had a hard time handing a lot of it over, since my business had been my baby since I started it on my own. It was my name on the door, my reputation, and I'd struggled letting anyone else be responsible for any piece of it except me. It obviously helped to have Liam and Louis there to help since I trusted them more than anyone else, but it was still a bit weird for me to have so many people to keep track of and an office outside of my house. I'd never been one for a stuffy office building, trying to focus more on the personal aspects of what I did, but we just became so big I had no choice. As it turned out, it had come in handy over the past couple weeks when I needed to focus and couldn't do it at home.

"Good Morning, Mr. Styles." Caroline smiled at me as I got off the elevator and walked towards my office.

"Morning." I replied as I shot her a look, reminding her that I hated it when people who worked for me called me Mr. Styles.

She chuckled to herself as she stood up and followed me into my office, bringing along the cup of coffee she already had waiting for me. She was quite a bit older than me, in her 60's, so she often just laughed and rolled her eyes when I told her to call me Harry. I remembered just how ridiculous I had thought the idea of me having an assistant was when Liam brought it up about a year earlier, but I couldn't deny that Caroline had made my life a lot easier, especially recently.