Hey everyone! Quick note for anyone who's also reading my story 'Flaws of Attraction' - once I get to 100 reviews on that I've decided that I'm going to post an extra chapter, so you may well get two in one day. You're welcome. ;)

A/N for this story is at the end of this chapter. Enjoy. :)

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Aria was heading back home after visiting her dad at Hollis, unwrapping a sandwich she hadn't had time to eat yet, when she caught sight of Alison. She paused, sandwich halfway to her mouth, and watched as Alison crept behind a tree and peered around it. Aria glanced around, but she couldn't see anything unusual; just college kids hanging out, professors talking in small groups as they walked to their offices, a mother feeding a squealing toddler. None of it explained why Alison looked so… intent.

Although she knew she was going to regret it, Aria also knew she wouldn't be able to sleep if she didn't at least try to figure out what was going on. She wrapped her sandwich back up and put it in her bag, walking slowly over to Alison.

"Hey," Aria said. She'd thought she was talking softly, but Alison jumped like she'd shouted in her ear.

"Shh," Alison hissed, dragging Aria behind the tree with her.

"Ali!" Aria squeaked. "What's going on?"

Her friend smiled at her, but didn't answer. She just motioned for Aria to be silent and then turned back to whatever she was so intent on watching. Aria tried to look too, but she couldn't find a way to get a good view and be discreet at the same time. She turned away, waiting for Ali to be done with whatever this was, so she could ask her about it.

But Alison wasn't in the mood for questions. She suddenly stiffened, her eyes lighting up, and muttered, "I knew it!"

"What -" Aria started, but Ali had already grabbed her hand and was leading her away.

Aria shot a look back over her shoulder, trying to see what had produced such a reaction, but everything still looked normal. So maybe she wouldn't sleep tonight.

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Aria looked up when the bell above the door jingled and saw Emily hurrying toward her, hood drawn low over her face to stop the icy wind. She sat down across from her, ordered a coffee, and blew on her hands to warm them up. Aria nodded at her in greeting, then went back to the notebook in front of her. She had a history test tomorrow, and she had to find some time to study in between all this investigating and interrogating.

"Sorry I'm late," Emily said, seeming even more distracted that she had that morning. These days it seemed like she was always rushing around, always running on caffeine and nervous energy, but it didn't look like she was getting anything done – or nothing that Aria could see, at least. She made a note to ask her about it at a more opportune time. "I had –"

"It's fine, Em," Aria interrupted, gesturing to the notebook. "I have a test tomorrow, so -"

"Oh!" Emily gasped. "Sorry."

She let her work in silence; the only time she said anything after that was to thank the waitress who brought over her coffee. The time slipped by quietly, and Aria was startled when she finished her chapter and looked at the clock. It was five twenty three.

"He's late," Aria said unnecessarily.

"Are you sure he's coming?"

She nodded. "This is where and when we said to meet. Maybe he -"

The door jingled, and a second later Matt was sliding into the seat beside her. He looked curiously at Emily, who gave a tiny wave.

"Hi," Matt said to Aria. "Thanks for meeting me."

"Thanks for calling." She dipped her head at Emily and added, "This is Emily. She was a friend of Vivian's too."

"Vivian?" Matt raised his eyebrows.

"I mean Alison." Aria was still confused about this whole situation. How did he know who Vivian really was? Had he known her as Alison as well?

"You probably have a lot of questions," Matt went on.

Aria nodded, rubbing a coffee stain on the table. She had so many questions she didn't even know which one to start with.

"I have a few of my own, actually. Like, what's your real name?"

She hesitated, biting her lip. Then she said, "It's Aria."

"Aria, huh?" He leaned back, giving her the same kind of look she'd given that pea plant they'd raised in biology last year. Their task had been to grow the plant from a seed and record its growth over the quarter. Hers had ended up twice as big as she'd hypothesized, and she hadn't been sure if that was a good thing or a bad thing.

"Yeah. I can show you my driver's licence if you don't believe me?"

For a moment she thought he was going to insist on it, but then he just smiled. "No, it's fine. Aria. I like that. It's a pretty name."

"Thanks." Had he really just wanted to get her real name? Surely there was more to this meeting. And sure enough, he cleared his throat and started to explain what he really wanted.

"After you talked to me about Vivian – Alison – I started thinking. That girl I told you about, Taffy? I think Alison had caught her out on something. I don't know what it was, but it sounded pretty serious. She kept threatening to go to the police or something, and I'm not sure if she did… but even the threat might have been enough to get her killed."

"So you think Ali knew something Taffy didn't want her to know?" Aria asked, trying to keep up.

"Wait," Emily interrupted. "Who's Taffy?"

"She was a friend of Ali's," Aria explained quickly. "We don't know her real name. But they were fighting a lot, and it sounds like she could have killed her."

Matt nodded, seeming satisfied with her explanation. "And there's more. I think Alison had done something herself. She wouldn't say what it was, and I didn't press her for information. But it sounded pretty bad. Like, whatever Alison had on Taffy, she couldn't use it because then Taffy would use what she had on Alison."

"So maybe one of them was blackmailing or threatening the other," Aria mused. If they could find out who Taffy was, they could finally figure out who really killed Ali. "Do you know anything else that could help?"

He spread his hands wide, indicating that he was fresh out of information. "That's about all I could come up with," he said apologetically. "But I thought, since you're busy being Nancy Drew and everything, you might want to know."

"Wait." Aria frowned. "Say that again?"

He looked confused. "I said I don't know anything else, and if you want to play Nancy Drew…"

She'd heard that phrase somewhere recently. She scratched her head, thinking, and then it came to her. "You wouldn't happen to know a guy called Jason, would you?"

"Alison's brother?" Matt asked. "Yeah. That's actually how I met Alison."

"You told me you met her at a bookstore," Aria reminded him.

"No," Matt said calmly. "I told you I met Vivian at a bookstore. That was the first time I knew she had some kind of undercover thing going on, but I'd known her for a while before that."

She tried to find a hole in his story, but it seemed to fit. He'd been Jason's friend, he'd met Alison, he'd found out she had a secret identity called Vivian, and he'd played along. "So why did you talk to me about her as if you didn't know she was Alison?"

He shrugged. "You were the one who said you were a friend of Vivian's. I had to be sure you knew her as Alison too before I brought it up."

"Oh."

Matt looked at his watch, then out the window. "Now, if there's nothing else you guys want to ask me, I should go. I have soccer practice."

"You play?" Aria asked, surprised.

He shook his head, his eyes twinkling. "No, I coach. The local junior team. You should come watch a game sometime."

Then he winked and was gone. Aria stayed where she was, watching a single ant cross the table. It would stop every few paces, like it was looking for something, and then with a little ant-sized-shrug it would keep going. Had Matt been flirting with her?

"I should probably go too," Emily said after a while, tactfully ignoring whatever had been going on between Matt and Aria. "But thank you for letting me tag along to this."

"Like I had a choice," Aria snorted, but she wasn't mad. She was actually kind of glad she'd had moral support for this meeting. Even though they weren't sure what any of it meant, anything new they learned about Alison's death sent shivers down Aria's spine.

Emily hesitated, halfway out of her seat. "We should tell the others about this, though," she said.

Aria exhaled deeply. "I know," she said slowly. "But can we figure that out later, right? I kind of have another conversation I need to focus on tonight."

Emily nodded sympathetically. "Of course. Good luck, okay?"

"Thanks." She watched Emily leave, feeling her heart sink to her shoes. Now that she didn't have to worry about meeting Matt, she was forced to turn all her attention onto the next big conversation she needed to have: talking to her father about his possible relationship with Hanna's mom. Because that was going to be fun.

The door creaked closed after her, filling her with an inexplicable sense of dread. She made her way slowly down the hall, her eyes drifting over the photos hanging from the wall. Her dad had taken down all the of the ones of her mother, aside from one. It had been a couple years ago, when they'd gone on vacation to the beach. Her dad had set the camera on timer, but he'd mistimed it and ended up having to dive into the frame so he didn't miss it. Aria and Mike were playfully wrestling on the sand; she had him in a headlock and was messing up his hair. And their mother was just sitting there, calmly sipping some kind of tropical juice that had come with a wedge of pineapple. And all four of them had crazy smiles on their faces, like this was the best moment they'd ever had.

She turned away from the photo, her heart aching slightly, and went into the kitchen. As predicted, her dad was sitting at the table reading the newspaper. He glanced up when she walked in, muttered a greeting, and then kept reading. Aria was tempted to just keep walking up the stairs and to her room, and pretend that she didn't need to talk to him. But she'd promised Hanna she'd do this. She dumped her bag on the floor and slid into the seat across from her father.

After a few minutes of silence passed, during which she chipped off her peeling nail polish, her dad looked up again, pushing his glasses further up his nose. "You okay, pumpkin?" he asked.

"Yeah," she said automatically, and then shook her head. "I mean no. I mean, I don't know."

He closed the newspaper, took his glasses off, and started to clean them with the sleeve of his shirt. Then he sort of squinted at her until it occurred to him to put his glasses back on. "What do you mean?"

She'd rehearsed this moment a hundred times in the drive over. She'd pictured every kind of reaction from him: indignation, denial, amusement, shock, anger. She'd imagined every possible way to ask him: dropping hints, asking outright, even miming it out. But now her tongue felt strangely heavy and her throat too tight. She pulled a bottle of water from her bag and took a big gulp. Her father never took his eyes off her.

"Are you dating Hanna's mom?" she blurted out suddenly, surprising both herself and her father, whose eyebrows shot up so high she was amazed they didn't fly off his face.

"Wh-what?" he stammered.

That was probably proof enough, but she hadn't come this far to give up so easily. "You and Hanna's mom," she said. "Are you two dating?"

"No," he said, looking confused – and concerned, like he thought Aria might have a fever or something. "What makes you think that?"

"I, um." She should really stop rushing into plans without thinking them through. "I heard that you guys kissed."

He peered at her over his glasses, and she had the strange feeling he was sizing her up, figuring out whether or not to tell her the truth. "We did kiss a couple of weeks ago," he admitted at last, and Aria wasn't sure whether to be relieved or freaked. "But it was just once. I don't think it's going to happen again."

Relief it is then. "Okay," she said. Just one kiss? That wasn't so bad, right?

Her dad seemed uncomfortable; apparently talking with his teenage daughter about his secret love life had not been on his agenda for the day. He cleared his throat, shoving his glasses back up. "Is that all you wanted?" he asked gruffly.

She nodded. "That's it," she squeaked, and then she fled to her room.

Aria flopped face-down on her bed and lay there for as long as it took to erase from her mind the image of her father and Hanna's mother kissing. It had just happened once. There was no need to mention it, or to think of it, ever again. After she'd finally worked the image out of her mind, she called Hanna. It was a brief conversation; Hanna was as freaked by this as she was. Hanna confirmed that it had just been a one-time thing, according to her mother at least. They agreed to never mention it again, said their farewells, and hung up.

Despite how weird the whole situation had been, Aria felt relieved. Her father had been honest with her, he wasn't dating Hanna's mother, and that seemed to be the end of it. If only things always worked out so well.

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Well, that was a bust. Aria hadn't freaked out over her father. She'd just gone and talked to him about it. Really? What happened to jumping to conclusions, hurling accusations, and freaking out? These girls used to be so much more amusing.

Still, I've got a few more tricks up my sleeve. I open the box again, checking the contents are undamaged. It's going to be a nice little surprise for when the girls go to investigate the stylist's. Not only will they not find what they're looking for, they'll find my little gift to them. I pick up a pen and quickly scribble a note, then stick it in the object inside the box. The message is clear, and if they don't listen to it, I'm going to have to find another way to get it into their heads… maybe with a hammer.

But now that plan is taken care of, I can turn my attention to other things. I've got big plans for these girls. Just wait and see.

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insertnameherex - oh my goodness, thank you so much. Reading your reviews always makes me smile so much. Although since you've figured out I'm -A I MAY have to kill you... kidding. I love you. ;)

Sgdp1261 - you're totally on the ball, and I love how you're trying to put the clues together; I'd always intended this story to be a bit of a puzzle, and I was hoping the audience would try to put the pieces together. I'm not saying you're right, but I'm loving your theories/thoughts. :p And thank YOU for always reviewing.

Forever Courage - see, this is what I like about the show: you're always second-guessing your thoughts, trying to put everything together, wondering what's clues and what's background noise. I tried to incorporate that into this story, so it's great to see people like you trying to figure everything out. Keep the guesses coming.

ihavealifeiswear - thanks for the review. And in response, here's a little teaser from the next chapter: "Spencer wordlessly shook her head, as if the thought... was too awful to contemplate." See you next time. ;)

Little spoiler here guys: next chapter one member of the A-Team will be revealed. And the more reviews I get the quicker I'll update, so get reviewing. ;)