Chapter Text
Emily walks up the steps to Ezra’s apartment slowly.
She’s climbing the stairs of Alison’s house with a fireplace poker in hand. There’s a noise from the nursery. She flings open the door and sees the white crib covered in blood, the rocking chair overturned, the pillows ripped up, torn beyond repair. Pieces of the smashed mobile cover the floor. Half of a ballerina lamp crunches under her foot. Someone did this. Emily chokes back a sob as she looks around at the wreckage.
She takes a deep breath. Anger is a luxury. The police are circling. They have to be strong together. Even if it’s been less than 48 hours since Aria was willing to sell them all out. Emily’s stomach churns at the memory.
Aria’s face is white and pleading.
“I can explain!”
“Aria, we literally caught you black-hoodied!”
They’ve all made mistakes. She signed Alison into Welby, watched her walk down the hall into a funhouse of horrors. She swallows hard, steels herself to walk up the last few steps and hear Aria out.
”Guys, I didn’t know what to do.”
“You could have talked to us, okay? We’re friends, since forever. That’s what we do!”
They are friends, Emily tells herself as she knocks.
Best friends.
They forgive each other. It’s what they do.
The door isn’t locked. It swings open.
A ripple of blind fear runs down her spine, a reflex. Fear is a habit. The swoop in her stomach. The prickle on the back of her neck, quick and primal. She’ll spend years trying to recreate the circumstances of this moment, trying to crack the code of what, exactly, made her afraid.
The apartment is empty. Her heels echo strangely on the hardwood.
No lumpy couch. No antique typewriter.
The walls stare blankly back at her.
No books stacked haphazardly on the shelves. No desk stuffed with papers.
The closet is dark and bare.
Emily feels the room start to spin.
Ezra and Aria are gone.
So gone, it’s like they were never here.
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“She ran,” Spencer says. Her voice is flat, but the words sound like she’s having to work to force them out of her mouth.
“We pushed her away,” Emily worries. She called the meeting out of instinct.
Get everyone together. Sit in a circle with concerned faces.
It’s what they do.
“Bullshit,” Hanna declares. “She was working for A.D. We caught her. She probably tortured us all in exchange for a free pass out of town! And now we’re stuck here with Tanner breathing down our necks and she gets to ride off into the sunset with Ezra!”
“Are we sure?” Emily asks. “What if she figured out who it was? What if she told Ezra and then A.D. grabbed them both?”
“No,” Alison says, shifting uncomfortably. “They called Ella from the airport. To tell her they were eloping. She seemed surprised we didn’t know.”
“This is so weird,” Emily says, wrapping her arms around her chest. “It feels like we’re talking about her behind her back.”
“She ran,” Spencer repeats, as if she’s trying to force herself to believe it.
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Emily and Alison sweep up the debris in the nursery. They repaint it a pale green. Pam comes over and helps put cheerful animal decals on the walls. A bear in a marching band uniform. A smiling giraffe.
Hanna designs three new dresses. Short and trendy, with elegant slash marks ripped from shoulder to stomach. Alison raises an eyebrow, says they look like something is trying to claw it’s way out.
Spencer holes up in the barn. She stops changing her clothes. Her hair looks matted and unkempt. There are dark circles under her eyes and a growing pile of liquor bottles in the trash.
A week goes by, then another.
No postcards arrive. No wedding announcements. No facebook posts.
No texts.
Nothing from Aria.
Nothing from Ezra.
Nothing from A.
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They’re standing on the sidewalk outside the Brew, looking at the CLOSED sign hanging on the door. It’s been there for the past four days. Today, it’s joined by a FOR LEASE banner in the window.
Spencer called the number. It went straight to voicemail.
“Mona has something to show us,” Hanna announces. “And nobody’s allowed to get mad, okay?”
She glares at Caleb, who’s face is already flushed and angry. He shoves his hands in his pockets and doesn’t meet her eyes.
They follow Mona, who’s moving nervously, wringing her hands in a way that reminds Emily of the old days when she was all braids and braces and a relentless thirst to fit in.
The game is sitting on a table in the middle of Mona’s apartment.
“I stole it,” Mona admits. “When I saw Tanner pull up outside Alison’s. I wanted to help.”
Spencer snorts in disbelief. Caleb coughs.
“Do you need a drink of water?” Hanna asks, irritably.
“No,” Caleb says, bitingly. “I don’t think it’ll help me swallow this story.”
“It’s not a story,” Mona says, holding her hands up in a gesture of surrender. “I thought I could beat it. I wanted to win.”
“Did you?” Alison asks.
“No,” Mona sighs. “That’s what I wanted to show you. It’s dead.”
“Dead?” Emily gulps.
“It used to cycle on and off,” Mona explains. “But then all of a sudden, it powered down. It hasn’t made a peep in weeks.”
They stare at the board.
“Careful,” Alison cautions as Spencer crouches down next to it.
No knives shoot out. No poison gas.
It’s just a shell. A game. A puzzle with the last piece missing.
“Did you take Aria off the board?” Alison asks.
Emily winces as she watches all the muscles of Spencer’s face tighten. The sound of Aria’s name is like a push on a bruise.
“No,” Mona says. “She disappeared. The day the game went dark.”
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“Do you think it’s over?” Emily asks one night.
They’re in bed, her arms wrapped around Alison in the dark.
“I’m not sure it’s ever going to be over.”
“Do you think she’ll come back?”
The silence stretches out so long, she wonders if Ali is asleep.
“No.”
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They still have meetings. It feels too weird not to.
Hanna starts bringing Mona.
Caleb refuses to come as long as she’s there.
Hanna stops inviting him. Problem solved.
There isn’t much to talk about.
The Archer Dunhill case goes away. Turns out Tanner was lying about the bloody glass in Spencer’s shower, trying to trick one of them into a confession.
Mona plants a bloody shovel at the Kahn cabin. Calls in an anonymous tip.
“The District Attorney is a simple man,” she promises.
She’s right.
That’s all it takes.
Case closed.
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Emily and Alison take every threat free minute as a gift, a moment they can spend making lists of baby names, talking through their birth plan.
They make out in the onesie aisle at Target, get so heated they knock over an end cap of diapers.
Alison is startled by the sound of her own laughter.
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Hanna feels the days building up like the bricks in one of those Poe stories Mona used to read to her.
Like she’s watching as her life gets walled off. Split into before and after.
She spends hours with her sketch book, cutting fabric and pinning samples on her dress forms.
Caleb’s sighs are like white noise as she works.
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Spencer still investigates. She doesn’t know what else to do.
She disables the alarm and ransacks what’s left of the Brew. She tears into bags of coffee beans, pours boxes of muffin mix out onto the floor. She rifles through the pages of every book and magazine on the shelf, tossing them into a pile in the middle of the room.
She wants to find a clue. A note. An itinerary. An answer to fill this gaping hole inside her chest.
She claws at the floorboards with her bare hands. Tears them up until her fingers are raw and bleeding.
She wraps them in a zebra print scarf she found under the counter. Drinks from a flask of tequila someone left under the sink.
Ezra’s office is cleaned out. Wiped down. There’s a single book propping up a leg of his uneven desk. She flips through the pages, and a picture falls out.
The five of them in the grass.
The summer before Alison went missing.
Aria’s head is leaning on Spencer’s shoulder.
The ghost of their teenage giggling tickles Spencer’s ear.
The tears run down her face, splashing the cover.
Tender is the Night.
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The weeks stitch themselves into a month.
Mona hacks into the airport security system, finds the footage of Ezra and Aria boarding a plane for Marseille. They’re laughing and holding hands as they talk to the woman at the ticket counter.
The last moment before they disappear into the boarding tunnel, Aria turns back.
She looks directly at the camera.
Then she turns and follows Ezra.
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Mona’s building burns down.
The game had a self destruct mechanism built in.
Hanna offers to let her move into the loft.
Caleb takes off for Toby’s cabin.
By the time he gets back, Mona has a new place. A furnished condo by the river.
Hanna checks into the Radley.
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Spencer tosses a ripped envelope onto Alison’s coffee table. It has rubber bumpers attached now to blunt the corners.
“I found something.”
Hanna and Mona look up from whatever fashion magazine they’re poring over. Surfacing from the pages of high end sunglasses and hemline trends.
Emily and Alison freeze mid-snuggle on the couch, Em’s lips nuzzling against Ali’s ear.
They don’t like discussing the kinds of things these meetings used to be about.
The lull feels precarious.
They don’t want to jinx it.
Tough, Spencer thinks.
Mona is the first to lean forward.
“A bill,” she says, examining it closely.
“An electric bill,” Hanna specifies, reading over her shoulder. “What are we solving? The Case of Who Left the Hair Dryer Plugged In?”
“Is that Ezra’s?” Emily asks, catching sight of the address label. “Spencer, how did you even get this?”
“They didn’t leave a forwarding address. Just put a stop on the mail. Sometimes things...slip through the cracks.”
“Did you break into the post office?” Alison asks, sounding almost impressed.
“No,” Spencer pauses. “It doesn’t matter how I got it. What matters is what’s in it.”
“Which is what?” Hanna asks, a bite in her voice.
“Way too much power,” Mona mutters. “Even if the account were for the whole building, there’s no way The Brew was coming close to hitting this level.”
She meets Spencer’s gaze evenly. “This is something else.”
“Electronics,” Spencer says. “Cameras. Computers. Heavy duty. Industrial grade cables and wiring. Banks of monitors.”
“Eyes and ears,” Mona nods. “Surveillance equipment.”
“A room full. Maybe more,” Spencer announces.
“Not a room,” Mona concludes. “A lair.”
“What are you saying?” Emily asks.
“It was him,” Spencer declares. “It was him all along!”
The others stare at her in silence.
“Ezra was A.”