The Adjacent Room [h.s]

Chapter 44

Liam has his arm around me again, but he hasn't said anything since I unfolded the paper. He knows what I'm reading, and he's just letting me do it in silence.

By the time I've read Harry's name signed at the bottom of the page, there are tears falling from my eyes so fast that one spills onto the page, smudging the ink.

This letter is everything I could've wanted and more. He explained and justified every single one of his actions that helped to cause our downward spiral, with so much candid honesty. I've never seen Harry so open and so vulnerable. Reading this has let me inside his mind, and given me every ability to reach into his heart and crush it where it hurts most. That's what makes it so scary for him. But, I want to heal his heart and his head, and anything else that needs healing. For once, I'm going to have to be the strong one. It's an ironic juxtaposition considering the flood of tears raging down my cheeks right now.

Throughout, he repeatedly says he has communication issues and calls himself jealous, selfish, narcissistic and toxic, as though he's telling me for the first time. Maybe it sounds bad, but I already knew all that. I know he's flawed. All I wanted was for him to just be open with me, instead of isolating himself. I don't care about the rest of it. I love him for all those reasons and all the ways he's flawed, just as much as I love him for everything else. Those parts of him are small, and they're so much less important than he thinks.

I'm so flawed too. I jump to conclusions but also I tend to overthink, I panic easily and I always seem to be crying and I've realised that I'm not good at communicating either, but he's made it so clear in these pages that he loves me despite that. I want him to learn to accept the parts of himself that he thinks makes him a bad person. You can't heal something that you hate.

He seems to think that he only just let it slip that he calls me 'angel'. I don't think he realises that he's always calling me his angel. It's usually when he's asleep and he mumbles it into my hair. I'm surprised he picked up on how I didn't like being called 'babe', but he got his reasoning wrong. I didn't like it because of who was saying it, not the word itself. I'm more than happy to be called his angel.

His letter made me realise that I had no idea his work had gotten so bad. In Paris, I saw the article that said he was leaving the studio during the 'early hours' of the morning. I should've paid more attention to that fact and how he was there so early in the morning, rather than the fact he was wearing my beanie. I should've been able to notice something like that. He's losing his voice when he sings, and he hates himself for feeling like he can't write anymore, and I know it's all at the hands of his management. I knew they were bad, but I didn't think they were completely immoral. I don't know how long it's going to take for Harry to be okay again, and I refuse to believe that he won't be okay, but all this with his management is going to stop.

And, even though it feels so insignificant right now, I need to know if it was actually him who was sending me home from the studio. What he said makes it seem like it wasn't, and that's where all the problems between us truly began.

This letter brought me a lot of comfort in the way it explained everything I was so lost about, but the one part that scared me, and is largely responsible for the tears on my cheeks, was his talk about his health. I may act like it, but I'm not dumb. I know that they're symptoms of something, but I don't know what that is. I'm scared the symptoms are of something more serious than what has already crossed my mind.

Harry has this ability to express so much emotion through his words, and he did it again in this letter. I can feel everything he went through by just reading each thought in his stream of consciousness, and it hurts my heart to know he felt the same as I did. I know what that felt like, and what it feels like, and I don't ever want him to go through it, but I left him outside my door to do just that.