"Happy Birthday, Ella!" I said as we tapped our cupcakes together. It was exactly 12:00 midnight on October 31st or 12:00 am on November 1st, whichever way you wanted to see it. This was how we'd celebrated our birthdays for the past 2 years. Home alone with Harley and Cecelia at school and mum at the shop with Damian both of which had most likely fallen asleep working. She did that a lot. So Ella and I were sitting in the middle of our library with a roaring fire behind us. It was my favorite room in the house with its walls covered in bookshelves, a huge window spanning most of one of the walls, and the heavy doors closed shut giving us our own little world. Ella smiled at me before taking a large bite of the cupcake effectively getting icing all over her face. I giggled before handing her a napkin.