The reviews are awesome! Questions, comments, suggestions? Please let me know. Aria is fifteen in this chapter and Ezra is twenty-four. I know this chapter is shorter than usual and contains very little dialogue, but it's necessary in order to connect it to what happens before and after this chapter. The point is to show how complicated Aria's life is getting. The next chapter is in Ezra POV. Enjoy! I do not own PLL.

On June 9, 2010, Aria looked outside her bedroom window and saw Ezra and Jackie sitting in his living room watching a black and white movie. She sighed before putting the curtain back into place and returning to her journal entry. "What kind of movies do they have in Iceland?" she wrote. She sighed before she picked up her book, Night by Ellie Wiesel, and settled into bed.

She had seen Ezra and Jackie together often during the course of the last year, but as her family packed up their house in boxes, and she compartmentalized her life into suitcases, her heart tightened and the back of her throat felt dry. Things were changing, and she didn't know whether they were changing for the better or the worse.

After the events of the last six months, her parents had made the decision to spend a year in Iceland for her father's sabbatical. Her mother had already taken a leave of absence at the high school and she and Mike were enrolled at an English school in Reykjavik . She knew that it was her parents last attempt at making their marriage work, and she knew they needed time away from the everyday chaos of their daily lives. Still, Aria sighed as she packed her sweaters and other winter clothing, one June 21, she dreaded the isolation that was to come.

Maybe she didn't dread it so much as she thought, she mused on June 30. With Alison gone, things had become…complicated. She had vanished without a trace, without a word, without anything, into thin air. And Aria spent her nights wondering what could have happened to her friend. She hadn't even been sixteen yet. Aria also devoted some time to wondering about Jackie, Ezra's girlfriend. Something didn't settle right in her stomach when she was around Jackie, and she couldn't tell what it what was. A part of her thought it was because Jackie had always treated her like a child even when Ezra had always treated her like an equal, like someone he could talk to.

Maybe. She couldn't figure it out, but maybe she wasn't supposed to. She was upset about Alison and Holden and she was even a little angry at Mr. and Mrs. Marin. Why couldn't they have made it work for Hanna's sake? She felt a little anger stirring inside of her at her father. She shoved away and locked it deep inside of her. Her journal entry for July 1 read "Where to now?" She didn't know the answer. She suspected no one knew the answer.

On July 4, Ezra ditched Jackie's family's Fourth of July celebration in favor of the Montgomery's. They had dinner and then popped firecrackers in the backyard. It was just the five of them, and although the group tried to be as festive as possible, sadness clung to the air like a rotten stench. Secretly, Aria was glad that Ezra was with them instead of with the Molina family. In less than seventy-two hours they would be gone and she might return to a different kind of life and a different kind of family. She wanted to keep things the way they were as long as she could.

Later, Ezra would tell her, "You couldn't imagine what I felt. I thought the only family I had left was leaving me."

She would respond, "You wouldn't of understood what was going on inside me. I thought my heart was ready to burst at the seams."

Two days later, on July 6, Ezra drove the Montgomery family and all their bags and suitcases to the Philadelphia airport, the first stop on their long trip to Iceland. It was a silent drive, and before the Montgomery's went through security, he gave each family member a hug and told them good-bye. Then, they were gone.

Ezra drove home, taking his time, trying not to think about life without Wednesday dinners and a home full of his grandparent's memories. He was slightly depressed, and he knew it. He mentally kicked himself for mourning over a family that was never really his to begin with. Jackie called him as he pulled onto the interstate.

"Hello," he answered.

"Hi, Z," she responded. "Are they gone?"

Ezra looked down at the clock on his car before responding. "Their plane left about fifteen minutes ago."

"Good," she said. "Can you come over tonight? I'll cook."

He thought about it for a moment before answering, "I think I want to stay home tonight. I'm not feeling that great."

"Do you want me to bring you soup? I can take of you like that time you got the flu in college."

"No thanks," he said. "I'm not that kind of sick. I'll see you tomorrow." He said a hasty good-bye before hanging up his phone. He ordered Chinese take-out that night and sat in his study. In his brown leather journal, the entry for July 6 read "Alone."

A state away, while Ezra was pulling into his driveway, Aria was sitting in New York's JFK airport, at gate B-26, waiting for the plane to take them to Reykjavik. Her mother was sketching in her pad, her father was working on his laptop, and Mike was playing on his PSP when she decided that she's rather spend her time reading instead of brooding over the changes that were happening in her life. She rummaged through her carry-on bag and was surprised to find a book she hadn't packed. She looked at the title Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf. She knew without hesitation that Ezra must have slipped the book into her bag when she wasn't looking. She started to read, stopping only when the flight attendant called for boarding and she had to show her passport.

She finished the book during the thirteen hour flight to the Reykjavik airport. It was about the moments that made up a day and the days that made up the years in the life of one woman. She took a moment to think about the moment she was experiencing as the plane touched down on the European runway. Then, she wondered what moment Ezra was experiencing in his life at that moment. Her journal entry for July 7 read "far away" and "unknown."

The moment that Aria had been thinking about her own life, Ezra was thinking about his future and where he wanted to be. He wanted a wife, and he wanted children. He wanted to let go of the past, but somehow hold on to those wonderful memories that the past was composed of without regrets. He missed his mother, his grandparents, his dad. He missed the Montgomerys and he half-expected Aria to ring his doorbell at any moment and ask to read in the tree house or Ella to call and invite him to dinner. Strangely enough, he didn't miss Jackie, and that's when he knew that he should take his future into his own hands. That night he went out with Hardy and got drunk over a girl. But this time there was no Aria to take care of him as he suffered through his hangover.

A/N For all you literature buffs out there, are you getting the book references?