Author's Note: Okay, here goes! Now the section in Italics is from CeCe's journal, only it's not exactly written in journal format. You'll see when you get there and I hope you like it!

It was a tense thirty minutes until the guys showed up with three cheesy pizzas in hand.

There were awkward smiles and hugs while Toby, Caleb, and Ezra said hello to everyone but that didn't last long once the pizza boxes were opened.

They were already settling into their seats, pizza in the hands of everyone but Spencer when she realized someone was missing. "Where's ˗"

"Oh yeah," Caleb said with his mouth full. "There was an emergency in Philly. Your hubby-to-be will be back as soon as he can."

Emily looked at Spencer. "Do we do this without him?" she asked.

Ezra looked back and forth between the girls, confusion wrinkling his brow. "Do what exactly? I thought this was just a reunion. Is that wrong?"

Spencer took a deep breath and then let it out in a rush. "This can't wait," she said as she leaned over the living room table to hand CeCe's journal to Toby.

He put his plate on the table and reached for the book. It only took him a few seconds to read the note and a curse fell from his lips once he'd finished. "It's CeCe's diary or something," he told the guys. "She says Charles isn't dead and that reading this will prove his identity."

"And Spencer called her mom. CeCe really did die in that asylum so that part of the note, the 'if you're reading this it means I'm dead' thing, is true," Aria said.

"So what do we do now?" Caleb asked.

Spencer held her hand out to Toby and he returned the diary. "We read it. Then we can go to the police," she said. Then she flipped to the first page and started reading without waiting for a response from the others.

Surprisingly enough, her voice didn't waver a bit as the secrets were unfurled.

Cecelia Addison Drake was just eight years old when she pushed her little brother down the stairs. She hadn't meant to really hurt him, or so she told her parents, but that's what happened all the same. The coma lasted two weeks. The brain damage would be permanent.

Her parents shipped her off to Radley Sanitarium, two hours away from the family home, and didn't look back for two years because of the incident.

But then, two years into her hospitalization and just days after a meeting with her parents (they were talking about letting her go home!) she met Him. Charles DiLaurentis, a little blonde haired blue eyed boy who had tried to drown his baby sister.

For CeCe, it was love at first sight.

Less than two hours after her first glimpse of the boy CeCe slapped her therapist across the face, effectively ending her parents desire to bring her back into their lives. Clearly she was just as unsettled as her parents had always suspected.

CeCe, Charles, and Bethany became the best of friends, a relationship made even easier by the fact that all of Bethany's personalities seemed to like Charles. It was as harmonious a friendship as one could have in a sanitarium.

But it was even better than mere friendship because Charles had a mother who loved him and visited often. When she heard of his friends and found out that their families never visited, Mrs. DiLaurentis started inviting Bethany and CeCe to spend time with her and Charles. The year after that she hired a private tutor for all three children and even bought them new clothes so they would look presentable during their sessions. She was a mother to them all.

So they studied everything and read anything they could get their hands on and Charles was good at games and learning, proving himself to have an extraordinary IQ and an eidetic memory. CeCe was a whiz with anything computer related. But Bethany…well she loved trying.

They also played games. Oh how they'd play! Board games, card games, games they'd invented themselves. Anything that worked their troubled minds, almost like they were trying to prove they weren't broken.

Without even realizing it, CeCe's happiness spilled out into her therapy sessions and she was being congratulated on how well she'd turned her life around. Thanks to her tutor she'd earned her GED and been accepted to the university he'd had her apply to. It was enough of an improvement that the Radley board had decided to release her on her eighteenth birthday, just in time for her to go to college using the scholarship Mrs. DiLaurentis had funded.

The only catch was that CeCe didn't want to go. She didn't want to leave her Charles, especially not alone with Bethany. And she was afraid that Charles would get worse without her.

It wasn't that Charles was crazy. He just had trouble separating fiction from reality. To him, everything was a game and anything was possible, thoughts that explained why he'd often don a white coat and pretend to be a doctor. He wanted to be one so he was one.

But he was proud of her and wanted her to get out while she could so she did. She turned eighteen and was all set to go to college when she heard a name in a boutique. DiLaurentis. Of course. Charles had family he didn't know, family who didn't know him.

So CeCe got to know them for him. She dated Jason and made friends with Alison and their mother couldn't say a damn thing without exposing her own dirty little secret to her oblivious children.

Then CeCe visited Radley near Charles's twenty-first birthday (she'd wanted to visit earlier but her psychologist had insisted she give everyone time to adjust before she returned as a guest) and everything changed. She, Charles, and Bethany snuck up to the roof late at night even though CeCe was supposed to have left and they certainly weren't allowed on the roof. That's when the incident happened.

Marion Cavanaugh interrupted them, telling them that the roof wasn't safe. When she tried to convince them to follow the rules Charles pushed her off the roof in a fit of rage. Without even talking about it first CeCe and Charles said the same thing when questioned: Bethany did it.

The false claim, believed and covered up by the Radley board, sent Bethany swiveling even further into madness and she attacked Charles more than once. But, thanks to the contract Bethany's parents had signed, the facility couldn't transfer her. So a decision between Mrs. DiLaurentis and the Radley staff and board was made. Charles was allowed to leave whenever he wanted, to get away from Bethany, as long as he slept at Radley each night.

And that situation seemed to be going great until the day CeCe received a frantic phone call that she would never forget. Charles's shaky voice told her that Bethany had snapped yet again, only she wasn't planning on attacking Charles himself. No, she'd escaped Radley and left a note behind, a note proclaiming her target. Mrs. DiLaurentis.

When CeCe and Charles arrived at the DiLaurentis's home it was almost too late. Bethany had beaten them there and was already walking towards the side door. Charles did what he had to do to save his mother, not discovering his mistake until the blonde fell to the grass and his mother rushed out of the house. He'd hit Alison, the little sister he'd never really gotten to know.

It wasn't until the next morning, after CeCe had watched Charles and Mrs. D bury Ali, that they realized Bethany was still missing. And CeCe realized that she'd dropped her phone at the scene of the crime.