It was a warm Thursday afternoon, with the last of the snow finally melting and the sun shining brightly from behind the clouds. Emily Fields walked down the school hallway, warily eyeing the sunshine that was streaming in from the glass windows. Spring used to be her favorite season when she was little. She used to love to pick flowers in the garden when they had started to blossom and create large bouquets that her mother would later put in vases. Emily would always try to get as many different colored flowers picked. She especially loved the red ones. Red roses, red tulips, strawflowers… as long as it was red, she loved it.
However, things were different now. She was different now. She had changed – she wasn't that little, careless girl anymore. She now knew that life wasn't always a picnic, in fact, recently it had been more of a volcano, each eruption burying her further down with lava and ashes.
So much had happened during the last few years. Alison went missing, they later found her body. Emily, Aria, Hanna and Spencer then started getting threatening texts from A. And Maya died. Nate killed her! How could it be that the first two people she had truly loved, the two people she loved most in the world, were taken away from her? Why did both Alison and Maya have to die? Emily would never admit this, and she knew it was selfish, terrible and cruel, but sometimes she got mad – two of her loves had died, why couldn't Caleb or Ezra have died instead one of them? Why was Emily the only one who had to experience these devastating deaths? And after all she had went through, she killed a person on top of it all! She had killed Nate, stabbed him with his own knife, took his life away and sent him away from Earth forever. Emily was sick and tired and fed up with people trying to console her – telling her that it was self defense, she was a hero, what she had done was brave. Since when did killing a person come off as brave? Since when did taking a person's life and throwing it far, far away count as heroic?
And now Toby. The one person she had trusted, the one who had helped her come out and saved her from Ben… was A. Emily still couldn't bring herself to believe that it was true. She had looked for him despite Spencer's warnings, but had been unsuccessful. Where was he? Was he dead? Had her searching for him caused his death?
It was all too much.
She couldn't take it anymore.
It had to end now.
And as Emily walked out of the empty school and out into the beautiful, pleasant sunshine, it did.
