On a Wednesday evening in early March, Emily Fields lay on the carpet in the bedroom she used to share with her sister Carolyn. Swimming medals and a big poster of Michael Phelps hung on the walls. Her sister’s bed was littered with Emily’s warm-up jacket, tons of oversized T-shirts, and a pair of boyfriend jeans. Carolyn had left for Stanford in August, and Emily relished having a space all her own. Especially since she was spending almost all her time in her room these days.
Emily rolled over and stared at her laptop. A Facebook page blinked on the screen. Tabitha Clark, RIP.
She stared at Tabitha’s profile picture. There were the pink lips that had smiled so seductively at Emily in Jamaica. There were the green eyes that had narrowed at all of them on the hotel’s crow’s-nest deck. Now Tabitha was nothing but bones, her flesh and innards eaten away by fishes and pounded clean by the tides.
We did that.
Emily slammed down the lid of her computer, feeling the urge to throw up. A year ago, on spring break in Jamaica, she and her friends had sworn that they’d come face-to-face with the real Alison DiLaurentis, back from the dead and ready to kill them once and for all, just like she’d meant to do at her family’s house in the Poconos. After a series of bizarre encounters in which this new, enigmatic stranger had uttered secrets that only Ali had known, Aria had pushed her over the edge of the crow’s nest. The girl had fallen several stories to the sandy beach, and her body had disappeared almost instantly, presumably carried out to sea by the tide. When the four of them saw the newscast on TV two weeks ago that this very same girl’s remains had washed up on the shores of the resort, they thought the whole world would discover what they already knew: that Real Ali had survived the fire in the Poconos. But then, the bomb dropped: The girl Aria pushed wasn’t Real Ali at all—her name was Tabitha Clark, just as she’d told them. They’d killed an innocent person.
As the newscast ended, Emily and her friends received a chilling note from an anonymous person known only as A, in the tradition of the two stalkers who’d tormented them before. This new A knew what they had done and was going to make them pay. Emily had been holding her breath ever since, waiting for A’s next move.
The realization cascaded over Emily daily, startling her anew and making her feel horribly ashamed. Tabitha was dead because of her. A family was ruined because of her. It was all she could do to keep from calling the police and telling them what they had done. But that would ruin Aria, Hanna, and Spencer’s lives, too.
Her phone bleated, and she reached for it on her pillow. ARIA MONTGOMERY, said the screen. “Hey,” Emily said when she picked up.
“Hey,” Aria said on the other end. “You okay?”
Emily shrugged. “You know.”
“Yeah,” Aria agreed softly.
They fell into a long silence. In the two weeks since a new A had emerged and Tabitha’s body had been found, Emily and Aria had begun calling each other every evening, just to check in. Mostly, they didn’t even talk. Sometimes, they watched TV together—shows like Hoarders or Keeping Up with the Kardashians. Last week, they’d both caught a rerun of Pretty Little Killer, the TV movie depicting Real Ali’s return and killing spree. Neither Emily nor her friends had seen the movie the night it originally aired—they’d been too shell-shocked from the revelation about Tabitha to change the channel from CNN. But Emily and Aria had watched the rerun quietly, gasping at the actresses who played their roles and squirming at the overdramatized moments where their doppelgangers found Ian Thomas’s body or ran from the fire in Spencer’s woods. When the movie hit its climax in the Poconos and the house exploded with Ali inside it, Emily shivered. The producers gave the show a definitive ending. They killed the villain and gave the girls their happily-ever-after. But they didn’t know that Emily and her friends were once again being haunted by A.
As soon as they’d begun receiving notes from New A—on the anniversary of the horrible fire in the Poconos that had almost killed all of them—Emily was sure that Real Ali had survived the fire in the Poconos and the push off the balcony in Jamaica and was back for revenge. Her friends slowly began to believe that as well—until the news came out about Tabitha’s true identity. But even that didn’t rule out the possibility that Real Ali was still alive. She still could be New A and know everything.
Emily knew what her old friends would say if she voiced such a theory: Get over it, Em. Ali’s gone. More than likely they’d reverted back to their old assumption that Ali had perished inside the burning house in the Poconos. But there was something all of them didn’t know: Emily had left the front door unlatched and ajar for Ali before the house exploded. She could have easily escaped.