Stella's POV
Later that night, after I had showered and gotten ready for bed, my bedroom door inched open. I was sitting on my bedroom floor, because I am a floor person, and I was looking at the pictures from the Manila envelope I had taken from the kitchen earlier. When I saw it was Ava coming into my room, I quickly stashed the pictures back in the envelope and shoved them under my bed. Part of me felt guilty for having them around Ava. Ava didn't have any baby pictures of herself and for a long time that's something she and I had in common. Baby pictures of me started when I was 3, baby pictures of her started when she was 6. We used to say neither of us had proof that we were ever actually babies. And now there was proof I was a baby. There was me in Troy's arms at the hospital the day I was born. There was a picture of me in a baby swing and Louis just leaning over on the couch watching me. There was my first Halloween, my first Christmas... all these things that I now had that Ava didn't, so I felt weird about looking at them around her. We had shown them to her when we first got them of course and she ooh-ed and ahh-ed over the cute ones and teased me for the embarrassing ones, but other than that I tried to avoid looking at them around her. I didn't need there to be another thing that divided us. There were already so many things already.
"Hey." I said.
"Hi." Ava said with a sigh, sitting down on the floor next to me. Oh no. Sighing is how all disappointing conversations start.
"What's wrong?" I asked.
"Stella, tonight was the best night I've ever had in my entire life." She said. I smiled a little.
"I'm glad you had fun." I replied.
"I'm so glad you chose me to be your best friend." She said, falling onto my lap. I laughed a little.
"It wasn't so much of a choice as you forcing me into it, devil girl." I told her. She took a deep sigh and I thought she was going to say something else, but she didn't. She just closed her eyes and lay there.
"Ava... I have to tell you something." I told her.
"Hmm?" She asked, not opening her eyes.
"I bought a house." I said. She opened her eyes now. It was as good a time as any to tell her. I was planning on moving in next week before Louis and Ava headed off to Europe.
"What? Where?" She wondered.
"A couple blocks away from here. It's really pretty. Me and Peter have been looking at houses for a while now and..."
"You and Peter?"
"He's just been helping me look, he's not going to move in there or anything. Not right away."
"How come you don't want to stay living here?"
"I love it here, Ava, I really do... but I've spent my whole life being dependent on you and Peter and now my brother and I really just need to figure out how to be on my own." I explained.
"Wait." She sat up. "You don't want me to come with you?" Her voice sounded sad, like a little kid's.
"Ava, you're so happy here and..."
"Stella, I don't know how to be without you."
"I think that's whole thing, Ava." I replied. "We need to be our people, we can't just be dependent on each other. But hey, you can visit any time you want and you won't be alone, you'll be here with Louis and Oli and..."
"But it won't be the same. You're going to be in a different house and I'm going to be here and we're going to say we're going to see each other and then something will come up and you'll be busy and I'll be busy and we'll drift apart. I don't want to drift apart from you Stella."
