Spencer taps her nails against her white ceramic coffee mug, her rhythm so methodical that it probably sounds like the seconds hand of an old clock to the handful of other patrons in the diner. The coffee's more bitter than she usually likes, but it's strong, and strong is exactly what she needs.

She's given up on putting sugar in her coffee. Coffee's not a treat, a dessert, something to enjoy like she deserves any delicacies; it's fuel, it's gasoline, it's as necessary to her as water. She drinks it black and as strong as she can brew it, and has it whenever she can get it, even though everything tastes like mud these days. Adderall will do that to you, after a while, turn your senses into deadweights that just hold you back from your thoughts. When your mind is running as fast as hers is, everything that makes you human feels like an iron ball. She's trapped inside her body; if it weren't for this pile of skin and bones, she'd be transcendent.

She wonders if this is how Mona feels all the time; if this is what adrenalized hyperreality feels like. Or maybe this is how Mona feels when she's medicated. After all, Mona has a personality disorder that basically turns her into a god, and right now Spencer feels like she'd be celestial if she weren't bound and shackled by the fact that she's real.

She checks her watch. A – Ezra – had given her the instant stuff, but she's not supposed to take more for another two hours. Part of her knows how ridiculous that is, that she's abusing amphetamines every hour of every day but still sticking to the recommended wait time, but she's an analyst before she's an addict. Giving herself cardiac arrest would ruin everything, and there are too many people depending on her to let her self-destruction come at their expense.

She takes another sip of her coffee, and then remembers the reason she'd checked her watch in the first place, and looks again. Eddie Lamb is five minutes late. There could be a million reasons for that, she knows, but with Eddie there's always the risk that he's bailing. She takes a deep breath, cups her hands around her mug, and forces herself not to keep checking the time every thirty seconds. Across the diner, the waitress gestures to her with the coffee pot, and Spencer smiles and nods.

It's three minutes, thirty-one seconds, and one more refill before Eddie Lamb walks through the front door of the diner. He's in jeans and a blue hoodie, not a Radley uniform, which is kind of surreal to Spencer, but she puts it out of her mind.

"It's good to see you," she says, as Eddie slides into the booth across from her. "How have you been?"

Eddie raises his eyebrows. "Spencer, we both know you didn't ask me to meet you so we could catch up," he says.

Spencer swallows. "I'm sorry," she says. "I – I really don't like putting you in this position, so thank you for coming. I really appreciate it."

"Let's just make this quick, okay?" Eddie shoots a look over his shoulder, then back at her. "You said you wanted to ask me about something."

"Yeah," Spencer says, and bites her lip. She can't straight up ask Eddie if he saw Ali at Radley after she disappeared: hey, did you see a dead girl at the mental hospital after she was murdered? "I wanted to ask you about someone you might have seen around Radley," she goes with instead. "Someone who might have been there before I was."

Eddie gives a long sigh, a pained look on his face. "You're talking about your sister," he says.

The world spins, and Spencer thinks she's going to fall even though she's sitting down.

"Melissa?" she asks. She's grasping the coffee mug so tightly her knuckles must be white.

It must have sounded like a statement, not a question, because Eddie just nods. "Yeah, that's right. Melissa."

Spencer doesn't say anything, just keeps her lips pressed together in a tight smile.

"I didn't know who she was until the first time she visited you at Radley," Eddie says. "I never signed her in for visiting hours, or read her nametag."

"When was the last time you saw her before she visited me?" Spencer asks. She keeps her tone as even as she can.

Eddie thinks for a second. "She was in over the summer, once or twice," he says. "Before that, I hadn't seen her in a few years."

Spencer's heart is pounding. "How many years?" she asks. She's trying her best not to let her desperation seep into her voice, but she can't quite keep it out.

"Two, maybe?" Eddie replies.

"So in 2009 or so?" Spencer realizes her leg is bouncing under the table, and forces herself to sit still.

Eddie shoots a look over his shoulder. "Yeah," he says, after a moment. "Yeah, that sounds about right."

"How often was she there?" Spencer asks.

Eddie's starting to get anxious; he's tapping his foot, and he keeps looking around, like he expects someone to show up with a gun to his head. "I don't know, pretty often," he says. "Most weekends, I guess? She usually had a book bag with her. I can't remember that well, it was years ago."

"That's okay," she says, reaching her hand out across the table to lay it on top of his. "Eddie, please. Is there anything else you can tell me? It's really important."

Eddie looks into her eyes for a long moment. "What kind of trouble are you in, Spencer?" he asks.

Spencer swallows. "We both know you don't want me to answer that," she says.

Eddie doesn't respond to that, but the guilt in his eyes is confirmation enough. He moves his hand out from under hers and checks his watch. "I should get going," he says, and moves to leave.

"Wait!" Spencer's voice cracks a little, and Eddie turns back to look at her. "When you saw Melissa over the summer," she says, "was Wren Kingston already working at Radley?"

"Dr. Kingston?" Eddie asks. He sounds genuinely taken aback. "Of course he was. Your sister's the one who asked him to take the job in the first place."

. . .

"Okay, first of all," Hanna says, "even if Melissa did tell Wren to work at Radley, how the hell would Eddie Lamb know?"

They're sitting around Spencer's kitchen counter – everyone's there, even Mona – with an open pizza box in front of them that no one's touched. Spencer's parents aren't home, which makes her house the best place to meet up, and the nice thing about being Spencer Hastings is that no parent is going to tell their kid they can't go over to her house to study.

"I don't know, Han, but Eddie wouldn't make something like that up," Spencer replies. "Maybe he overheard them talking one day. It doesn't matter, what matters is –"

"Yes, it matters!" Hanna says. "Or, if Melissa was there all the time this summer, why didn't I see her when I was there?" She looks over at Mona. "Why didn't you?"

Mona's lip twitches, just slightly. "I don't know what I did or didn't see this summer, remember?" she asks.

For a split second, Hanna looks… devastated, but then it passes so quickly Spencer might have just imagined it. "Whatever," she says. "What are we gonna do about the picture Emily found? That's our first priority, right?"

"There's nothing we can do with it," Spencer says. "You don't think we've learned our lesson about trying to take evidence to the police?"

"Yeah, but this is different." Hanna rips a slice of pizza from the pie and puts it on her plate. "I mean, it's proof that he was hooking up with Ali when she was fourteen. It's enough to put him behind bars long enough to save Aria."

"What's to stop Fitz from telling them that she lied about her name and age, and that he didn't even realize the blonde girl on all those missing posters he saw two years later was the same girl he met on a drunken trip to Cape May?" Mona asks. "The police will buy whatever excuse he comes up with. Face it, Han, the cops will always believe people like him over people like us."

It's the truth; it makes Spencer feel dirty all over, but it's a truth she's learned a thousand times over, a truth she's been choking on ever since Ian Thomas walked into the very room she's sitting in right now and announced that he'd married her sister, and made sure her house would never feel safe again, not even almost a year after she'd watched him being lowered into the earth. The police would never be on their side, and she could never count on them to protect her or any of her friends. It was naïve and stupid to hope for anything different.

The girls leave after another hour of not making any decisions, and the whole time Spencer is trying not to check her watch, because she knows she can take another pill now but she can't do it in front of them, especially not now that they're on high alert. She goes for the bottle the second she's alone in the house. She takes a shower, quick and ice cold, and by the time she gets out she can already feel her mind hardening into something sharp and sure.

Five minutes later, she's on the phone with American Airlines. "Yes, this is Melissa Hastings," she says in a cool, smooth voice. "Yes, I'm terribly sorry to bother you. My fiancé and I have different dates in our calendars for my upcoming flight, and I was hoping you could – yes, exactly, thank you so much." She rattles off Melissa's passport and frequent flyer numbers by heart, and waits as the employee on the other end types them into the system.

"Oh, perfect, that's exactly what I thought," she says when the representative comes back with a date, while on her laptop she's pulling up her calendar and typing it in. "Yes, thank you so much. Have a good evening." She hangs up.

Melissa gets back in less than a week. She didn't know Melissa had any plans to come back that soon – she doesn't think anyone in her family knows, but she has it confirmed. When she'd called, she'd expected to hear that Melissa had booked a flight towards the end of December, and that the earliest she'd get to talk to Melissa in person about Radley would be around Christmas. This is better than she could have anticipated.

Or something's wrong, a little voice at the back of her head says. Why else would she book a flight back early and not tell anyone?

And then that dark part of her brain that she hates more than anything says: maybe she's in on the game.

She refuses to believe it, that Melissa's part of what's being done to them, to Aria, to Alison – but she remembers Melissa believing Ian over Spencer, when Spencer had tried to tell her what Ian was. She'd taken Ian's side over Spencer's, she'd defended what Ian had done to Alison; for all Spencer knows, she would take Ezra's side, too. Melissa hates Alison, she always has, and she's always had her secrets.

If Aria's great love can be the one behind the game, Spencer's sister can be in on it. She can't trust anyone, can't assume the best of anyone, can't expect anyone to be on her side. Melissa brought Ian into their home, even though he'd kissed Spencer when she was barely fifteen, even though Spencer had insisted that he couldn't be trusted and begged Melissa to believe her, just once. Melissa might have been behind the fire at the lodge, might have been the other Queen of Hearts on the Halloween train.

Melissa might have been out to hurt her, all this time, and Spencer had ignored the signs because she wanted so desperately to believe her sister loved her, despite everything between them.

She should never have let herself be so stupid.

. . .

A/N: Thanks so much for reading, guys – I really hope you're enjoying so far.

For anyone who's interested, the Aria playlist for this fic is also up now: /fellowshipofthefalls/a-r-i-a . If you check it out, let me know what you think!