MY GIRL // Harry Styles

My Girl

Challenge: find all the parallels between this chapter and the first one ;) - Allie.

.

Ten years ago, in the town of Holmes Chapel, a little girl started her first journal entry with a story for her class assignment. She defined true happiness as the older boy next door who owned her heart. Her parents' marriage had proven that true love didn't exist, yet Harry showed up and all her walls came tumbling down.

Every day before bed, Thea would write about him in her pink notebook, about the possibility of an unknown future where they lived happily ever after. She was so young. And everything was easy until it was not.

He was hers until he wasn't.

One night she went straight to bed without writing about him. There was nothing to write about the person you were no longer friends with.

She'd been losing sleep, asking herself why Harry never came back to their treehouse, why he didn't say hello when he walked right past her with his friends, how he could just stop knowing her. She kept wondering, yet she waited, and waited, and waited.

She waited, until he left her.

For two years since he was gone, she'd been expecting a call, a letter, anything that let her know for him she still existed. But every day came a new disappointment as she checked her mailbox to find nothing from him.

Eventually, Thea took her mother's advice to write to Harry first. She began with a draft in her pink notebook, putting her heart and soul into every single word on the paper. But once she'd finished it, her fear of never getting a response overpowered her need to reach out for him. So she kept it to herself and decided to write even more letters that she would never send; just to get the overwhelming sadness out of her system, and for her to miss him a bit less every day.

Now 24-year-old Harry was alone in his bedroom, too focused on those words to even notice the sun was rising. With tears running down his face, he imagined her reading everything to him.

Dear Harry, she would begin in each letter before telling him about her day, her silly thoughts, her plan for the future, how much she'd missed him, and asking him questions like 'are you coming back?' and 'do you think about me sometimes?' All of those things made his heart wrench in a way that healed him and tore him up at the same time.

The bone-deep fear grew much larger now that he'd reached Thea's last entry written the night before her first time on a date. The love she had for Blake was proof that she had moved on from Harry once and would do it again if she wanted to. So apparently, Harry had less time on his hand than he thought. It was in that moment of dismal stillness that all the voices in his head started screaming at each other. What should he do now? One wrong move would inevitably lead to major consequences. But if he didn't make a move, he'd have zero chance of winning her back.

As his ringtone pierced through the silence like a cannonball, Harry's eyes sparkled with hope. He had prayed that it was her until seeing the name Niall on the screen made him gutted. Harry held the phone at his ear, falling down onto his back and darting his tiring eyes to the ceiling.

"Harold," his best friend spoke first. "Do you know the brand of that camera Isey's been using lately?"

Harry sighed at the question, laying an arm on his forehead. "I don't know, mate. Why don't you ask him?"

"I did text him but he hasn't replied. Thanks anyway, I'll wait until he comes back from Holmes Chapel."

The town name caused Harry's eyes to shoot open as he sat straight up on the bed, eyebrows drew together. "Why's he in Holmes Chapel?"