Murphy's Law ✔️

Chapter Twenty Three.

In three months, Murphy had sold over 50 thousand copies of her EP.

She wasn't expecting it, really- and honestly, Harry wasn't either. The entire idea behind her releasing the body of work was simply just for her and only her- to get her story out into the world, regardless of feedback. Murphy would always remember the day of January 2nd.

She woke up that morning just as she did every morning- naked. Harry had brought her daily cup of coffee into their bedroom and held it out in front of her until the smell simply woke her up. With a gentle kiss to her forehead, Harry had left the apartment and made his way to work. Murphy fell back into a deep slumber minutes after his departure only to wake up an hour later to a phone call from a breathless Harry.

"Baby," he had breathed into the receiver, "check your stats on Spotify right the fuck now."

Murphy frowned at his tone and with a scoff and a sarcastic comment about his bossiness, she opened up her laptop. She wasn't expecting to see the 20k listens that definitely weren't there before she fell asleep the night prior.

It was like an avalanche from there- a local radio show had picked up on her most popular song, 'Colder'- a song about growing cold due to being hurt in the past. It seemed as though the radio play had skyrocketed her views and caused a decent amount of people to discover Murphy Smalls, a soft spoken girl from London who's only goal was to put her story out into the world.

Then, the offers started coming in. Specifically, a record deal with a label named Island Records- who made promises that she'd become a huge name across the world within the next few years. With a smile and her hand clutching Harry's a little too tightly- she shook her head, politely declined, and informed them that she'd prefer to stay independent. Harry's smirk of pride was not hidden very well.

The opportunity to play a show came next- and Murphy had reluctantly agreed. I say reluctantly simply because it took her three days of constant pacing around the apartment before Harry grabbed her by the shoulders, looked her in her eyes, and asked her: "Murphy, what do you want to do? Don't think about what anyone else wants you to do."

And, well- he had a good point. She, admittedly, was thinking about how everyone else would react- would Niall be around that night? Would Liam? Would it be awkward performing on a stage like that? What would Kitty think of her? Would anyone from her old life recognize her?

And then Harry made her think of herself- and yeah- she did want to accept the performance. She rationalized that the worst that could possibly happen was that she fucked it all up completely and everybody forgot about her and she could simply just be proud of the fact that, at least, she had tried. And so, two weeks before the performance, she called the venue and accepted their offer of a thirty minute set in an abandoned church.

After doing some research on the space, she had never been so excited and so nervous all at once. Big name stars claimed their start to fame after performing on that very stage in front of a capacity of five hundred. Murphy didn't think she'd sell half the tickets- but three days before the show, she would learn that the entire venue was sold out.

That day, Harry had finally made the decision that it was about time for Murphy to get social media. He'd set her up with an Instagram and a Twitter account. It'd taken three hours and a bunch of posts-and-delete's for Murphy to finally get the hang of it. Once she did- Harry took a picture of her on their balcony with a physical copy of her EP (she was smiling so hard you couldn't see the whites of her eyes), which she posted to Instagram. By the end of the night, she had 5 thousand followers.

Murphy didn't quite understand the concept of social media as much as the rest of her generation, but Harry assured her at least a dozen times that it was a necessary thing for a 20-something year old to have at least one form of social media. Murphy had shrugged, given him a follow on Instagram, and discovered dozens of photos he'd posted of her (without her knowledge) with cheesy captions. Her first bout of embarrassment was finding a picture of herself passed out and drunk on Niall's own page, the caption simply: 'murphy mate can't handle the craic ahahahahah'. Murphy called him immediately and ordered him to take it down.