I totally didn't see this going where it went. Enjoy!

Aria looked up from her reading and stared at her mother. She didn't seem angry or upset. She didn't seem happy or pleased either. Ella sat in her daughter's desk chair and looked at Aria.

"We need to talk," she repeated.

"Okay," said Aria slowly putting her book, she was rereading The Dead, down beside her. "What's up?"

"I don't know how to tell you this," Ella took a deep breath and let it out, "There have been rumors and school about Ezra and a student." She paused. "Do you know anything about them?"

Aria was suddenly angry, "If it those things Noel Khan tried to spread around at school," she shook her head. "Is it those things?"

Ella shook her head and said softly, "I've noticed things too, Aria." Aria looked at her mother sharply. "You've been happy lately," Ella continued softly, "happier than I've seen you in a long time, but that doesn't mean you shouldn't be careful."

"I am happy," Aria told her mother softly. Ella reached out to squeeze her daughter's hand.

"Sometimes society doesn't always think what we want is okay to have." Aria remained silent, unsure what she should divulge to her mother, unsure of what to keep to herself. "But sometimes society is wrong," Ella continued. "Do you know how Ezra's parents met?" Aria shook her head. Ella got up from the chair and joined Aria on the bed. Aria snuggled close to her mother and listened to the story she was about to tell.

"I met David once a long time ago when Ezra was just a child. Your father and I had just moved into this house. I think it was the only time I ever saw David Fitz at the Springer's. His wife had just been diagnosed with breast cancer. He looked so sad and forlorn. You could tell by just looking at him that something was wrong. But Diane, she seemed on top of the world. You would never have known she was sick. I think she was doing it for her parents and for Ezra, so they would have at least one last memory of her healthy and whole."

Aria sighed and Ella continued, "I was working on the garden one afternoon and David came up to the fence and started talking to me about plants. But he broke down after a few minutes. He started telling me the story behind how he and Diane met, and I didn't know what to say to him so I just listened. Diane had gone to California for college. She hadn't wanted to leave her parents behind, but she ended up doing it anyway. A part of her needed to explore the world. She was at school when she met David. They married shortly after they graduated. Diane had Ezra when she was twenty-five. She died before her thirty-third birthday."

Ella took a deep breath before she finished the story, "David started breaking down. I had never seen a grown man cry before. He said that he hadn't been a student at the university. He had been a professor. His entire family had been against the marriage and so had the faculty at the school. But he married her anyway. When she got sick, he felt like he was being punished."

Ella started to stroke Aria's hair. "I don't think I had ever seen anyone so heartbroken, so utterly lost. He felt guilty for everything he had put Diane through, everything he had put her parents through, and everything that Ezra was about to go through. He was going to grow up without a mother." Ella sighed and finished, "I think you should ask Ezra why he moved to Rosewood."

"It's because the Springers died," answered Aria.

Ella shook her head, "No, sweetie, it's more than that." Aria looked out her window at Ezra's house. The curtains were closed. She wasn't surprised. He kept them closed out of habit lately. She looked back up at her mother.

"What happened?" demanded Aria softly.

Ella got up and gave her daughter a long hug before looking at her. "That's not for me to answer." Ella turned and left the room.

Aria sat on her bed for what seemed like hours before she put her shoes on and walked over to Ezra's. She rang the doorbell impatiently, and when he answered she could only ask "What happened?"

He gave her a puzzled look before pulling her inside his house. "What do you mean what happened?"

She stared at him eye to eye, a feat considering she was more than a foot shorter than he was. "What happened? In 2007? Why did you move here?"

"Aria, calm down," he soothed her. He rubbed her arms. She moved away from him.

"What happened?" she repeated.

Ezra sighed. "What did your mother tell you?"

"How did you know it was her?"

"She's the only person I confided into." Ezra rubbed his face with his hand. "What did she tell you?"

Aria's voice softened slightly. "She told me how your parents met. How your mother died. Why you grew up in California. She didn't tell me why you moved here," Aria finished pointedly.

"Sit down, please," he pleaded. She stiffly complied, and he sat next to her. "My mom died when I was seven. I remember standing at M.D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston. There was nothing more the doctors could do. She had wasted away until she was almost nothing. I think she held on as long as she did for my sake. I spent the rest of my childhood being shipped from boarding school to boarding school. My father threw himself into his work and he didn't have time for a child. Sometimes he sent me here, but not often enough for my grandparents taste."

Ezra paused and he continued. "I reminded him of her. It hurt too much. It was easier to send me away than to deal with me. And my grandparents, they reminded me of her too. It was easier to ignore the fact that they existed because it hurt too much to acknowledge otherwise. I know you blame me for leaving them here alone, but I was afraid that one day they would wake up and look at me the way my father looked at me."

Ezra swallowed. "I was a senior in college when I found the pile of letters she left me. They were the kind of letters that someone who knows they're dying writes. There letters for every birthday she would miss until I turned eighteen. They were letters for my wedding day, the day my first child was born, the day I graduated from college, and other letters that I'm not supposed to open yet.

"I was so angry at my father. He had kept her from me, and I decided that I would come back here to try to get to know her. The only thing that was standing between me and Rosewood was graduation. But Grandma and Grandpa were in that accident a week before graduation. I decided to move here. I would get to know all three of them by myself. I cut my father from my life almost completely. He had to beg me to come home for Thanksgiving that first year. I had never heard him beg before. He died in 2009."

"A heart attack," whispered Aria. Ezra shook his head.

"I think his broken heart finally caught up with him. The only family I had left in the world was gone." Suddenly Ezra laughed harshly. "He lived a whole month after his brother died. His family had cut him off after he married my mother. They were very wealthy and affluent, but eventually my dad was the only family left. He inherited everything, and then he died, and I got it all. Jackie wasn't the only reason I stayed in California so long that summer."

During his explanation Aria had begun to soften until now when she had heard the last bit of the puzzle, "Fitz," she said softly, "Fitzgerald. Your father was a Fitzgerald?"

He nodded shamefully. "Guilty."

"Your family doesn't have money, your family has money." She stopped to think for a minute. "Now?"

"Some obscure cousin inherited the family business. I only received money, a few houses, some property, things like that."

"What are you doing then, teaching high school?" she asked.

"Doing what I love," he answered. "I love teaching high school. I love reading and exploring."

"You should have told me all of this that day in the tree house," she stated.

"Aria," he sighed. "I told you the most important part. I told you that I wanted a family more than anything else, that as much as I wished it, your family wasn't my family. That I spent the year you were gone looking for something. I was lost."

"Did you find what you were looking for?"

"While you guys were in Iceland, I didn't find what I wanted. It was only after you came back that I found what I was looking for."

She swallowed and looked him, "Why did you make it so hard for us? It shouldn't have been that complicated."

"But it is, Aria," he answered smoothly. "You're my student, and you're seventeen years old. I don't want you to shoulder the burden of my past."

"Why shouldn't I?" she shot back. "I've burdened you with mine."

He hesitated. "Maybe I was scared," he admitted.

"Do you remember that assignment you gave in January, the one where you told us to write about growing up?" He raised an eyebrow and nodded. "It was the first time I told you I love you. Do you remember Hanna's paper, or Emily's or Spencer's?"

"Vaguely," Ezra responded.

"Hanna is dealing with her stepmother and stepsister and the fact that she feels replaced by her father. Growing up to her has meant accepting abandonment, about knowing that the people who should love you won't always be there when you need them. Spencer, her sister had just married a man who made out with her while she was a freshman. And she had fallen for Wren, the fiancé her sister brought home. Growing up for her means trying to puzzle out the grey area in life. And Emily," continued Aria breathlessly. "She had just told her parents she was gay, and they weren't looking at her the same way. For her, growing up means accepting who you are even when others don't." Aria looked back up at Ezra, "I think growing up for you has meant accepting that life can be sad. It can be wonderful too, but it also full of heartbreak and back decisions. Everyone regrets the past, you just regret it more than other people."

She took her hands in his. "Don't regret us."

"I love you," he said, pushing her hair out of her eyes.

"I love you too," she responded. They sat and talked for another hour, each sharing their deepest feelings and emotions. He went to dinner at her house that night, and if her parents caught them holding hands as they entered the front door, they remained silent on the matter. Ella fussed over Ezra like he was her long lost son, and Byron involved him in a conversation about March Madness. Mike took the hint and acted as if nothing out the ordinary were happening.

Ezra came up to Aria's room that night before he went home. He found her laying on her bed, reading.

"Thank you," he said from the doorway.

"For what?" she asked, smiling as she looked at him.

"For looking at me the same way as you did yesterday." He walked into her room and gave her a kiss on the forehead. "See you tomorrow?"

"Of course," she answered and watched him as he walked out the door.

Before she went to bed that night, she wrote an entry for March 12, 2012.

It's the people that you thought you knew that you find you really don't know in the first place. There is pain and suffering and hurt in this world, but there is also happiness and hope and faith. There is a goodness in people that cannot be taught and cannot be learned. But there is also a brokenness that can only be born out of anguish. There are regrets bred out of misunderstanding. There are sorrows created out of regret. We cannot unbreak what has already been broken. We can only hope to heal the rift, so ease human heartache.

Ezra was not the person I thought he was. But maybe I'm not the person he thought I was either. He was always so patient with me, and so understanding. But I was the one that misunderstood him. His heart is as good as ever, but I think he's afraid of making the same mistakes that his father made. The story of his parents is eerily similar to ours. He pushes me away because of what society thinks and feels, but I think he really does it because he doesn't want to cause hurt in anybody else's life.

Growing up means change. It means adapting. This might not be the life I pictured for myself, but so be it. It is the life I choose for myself. I choose to be with Ezra whatever complications or unexpected news arrives. I love him.

From that day on, Aria Montgomery realized that the love she had for Ezra Fitz was not the girly love of first romance or the love between friends. It wasn't even the kind of love that made her want to pounce on him all the time. It was the kind of love that started out as all three and slowly and quietly evolved into an enduring love that was constant and unshakeable.