A/N Thanks for the reviews!

For those of you who were wondering, the version might not contain as many chapters as the first, but it will definitely be as long because the chapters themselves will be much longer and contain much more information. I'm not sure exactly how many chapters there will be.

Thanks for reading :) Give me some ideas on some specific scenes that you would like to see in this story. I can't promise that I'll be able to put them in or make them work with what I have going on in my head, but I'll see what I can do.

Before Aria realized it, an entire year had come and gone, a year of birthday presents and Christmas gifts, Easter egg hunts and Fourth of July barbeques. It was an entire year of mourning and heartache for Hanna, who had broken up with Sean, and dazed happiness for Emily, who began to date Ben. It was the year of Spencer's blossoming friendship with Jason DiLaurentis, and the year Aria and Holden decided to remain friends. All in all, it was a quiet year Aria thought, the year she turned fifteen.

But she began to notice slight things, things she wouldn't have noticed a year ago. She began to become aware of her own changing body, every day as she looked in the mirror she saw something different. Her skinny frame was beginning to fill out, and slight curves were revealed in form-fitting clothing. Her hair grew out of the pink streaks and she replaced them with blue and purple and red before going back to pink highlights. Her nails she painted a different color every week, and her clothing gradually began to favor darker shades. She noticed that her face was changing too. Her lips were becoming fuller and her bone structure more defined. Sometimes, she barely recognized herself in the mirror.

She also became more aware of her friends' changing habits. Spencer, who had spent part of her summer interning at the mayor's office, began to become obsessive about college applications and entrance scores. She threw herself into her schoolwork and afterschool activities. Spencer became taller and leaner, more comfortable in a blazer and loafers than jeans and a t-shirt. Emily, who was a talented swimmer, became even more competitive and dedicated, spending hours working at the pool each day. Like Spencer, she too was interested in college, but for very different reasons. The older she grew, the more aware she became that she would need a swimming scholarship to pay for her education, and she learned to play her part of athlete well. Hanna, who was struggling over her parents' separation and divorce, began losing weight and becoming more aware of herself as someone to care about, dressing up and caring perhaps too much about her appearance. She silently cried out for attention.

Aria also became conscious of Ezra as an adult in her life rather than her neighbor or her friend. He was a teacher at the school she attended, an authoritarian figure, and the age difference between them became increasingly apparent. He spent more time out with Hardy and with Jackie. He seemed happy with Jackie, and it was a relationship that lasted much longer than the one with Simone. Aria didn't wish the couple ill, but she didn't wish them well either. With Jackie around, like with Simon, Aria couldn't go over to Ezra's and read whenever she wanted; she couldn't talk to him whenever she wanted to either, but it was more than that. Jackie stirred up an unpleasant feeling in Aria that Simone hadn't. Aria was glad when they broke up right before Christmas of her sophomore year. It made the holiday much more pleasant.

What made Christmas much less enjoyable was the arguing between the Montgomery parents. Barbed comments and complaints were passed between them liberally, and Aria couldn't remember exactly when they had begun. She could remember her parents fighting about their Halloween plans and then about the stuffing at Thanksgiving. As Christmas vacation approached, the arguments were about Byron becoming a workaholic and Ella being too involved in her art, something she wanted to reconnect with now that her children were older. In early December, Aria had felt confident her parents would work things out, but by New Year's Eve, Aria wasn't so sure.

She was sitting with her parents and Ezra in their living room, watching the ball drop on T.V. Mike had fallen asleep earlier, and Byron had quietly put him in bed as they waited for midnight. And as midnight fell, for the first time in their nineteen-year-marriage, Byron and Ella Montgomery didn't kiss each other. Aria was slightly stunned. It was a tradition. Ezra tried to cover up the moment by kissing both Aria and Ella on the cheek while Byron wished his daughter a happy new year. It was only the next day, after she had recovered from the astonishment of the entire event that Aria wondered why Ezra had spent New Year's Eve in her home instead of out with Hardy, getting drunk. And she would remember that kiss for years, the memory seared into her mind. It was a symbol of so many things.

As the holidays ended, the tension between her parents didn't seem to dissipate and disappear. Instead it became longer and more drawn out, and the Montgomerys became strangers to one another, more distant as the months passed, January to February, February to March, winter into spring. Valentine's Day was unnoticed and unmentioned. Although Ezra still attended Wednesday dinner, he too could sense the feeling of ill-will in the Montgomery household.

It was the morning two days after Spring Break when Aria called Ezra and asked him if he could take her to school. It was too late to call Spencer for a ride, and her mom was sick. She walked to his driveway, where he was waiting for her in his car.

She got in the passenger's seat silently and placed her bag on the floor. Ezra noticed that she was wearing sunglasses and her pink-brown hair was in a messy bun. She sipped coffee from her travel mug the whole way to school. "Is your mom okay?" he asked eventually.

"She'll be fine," replied Aria, her voice monotone.

"Did she manage to find a substitute or should I let Principal Hackett know when we get to school?"

"She got one," replied Aria, looking out the window.

At the red light, Ezra took a moment to look at her. She looked tired and stressed, and she was uncharacteristically close-mouthed. "Are you going to be okay?" he asked. He was pushing it, and he knew it.

"I'll be fine," responded Aria. She took a sip of her coffee before adding, "Eventually." When they reached the school parking lot, Aria quickly jumped out of the car without saying a word.

Ezra puzzled over what had happened, and he even spent a portion of his lunch period looking for Aria in the crowded cafeteria just to check on her. He was concerned. Aria waited for Ezra at the entrance of the school after she had been dismissed for the day. She followed him to his car, ready for the ride home, when he turned to her and opened up his bag.

"It's Night by Ellie Wiesel," he said. "I know Mrs. Welch has it on her supplementary reading list. I thought you could use a good read to escape." Aria took the book from him but didn't respond. Ezra sighed and got into his car, steeling himself for the silent drive home. He noticed that she fingered the book during the drive while she looked out the window, distracted.

When he pulled into his driveway, she immediately took off her seatbelt for a quick exit, but Ezra put a hand over hers, stopping her. She looked up at him, her eyes silently questioning.

"Do you want to tell me what's really going on?" he asked gently.

After a moment, she leaned back in her seat, her shoulders slumped in defeat. "Mom and Dad had a big fight last night," she mumbled.

"I know they've been having problems lately," he answered. "But what's wrong with you?" He looked at her, willing her to respond.

She sighed. "I'm scared. I'm worried that my parents are going to split up, that I won't have my family anymore." She looked at him, her eyes filling with tears.

"Oh, Aria," he breathed out. "You know I love your parents as if they were my own, right?" She nodded in response. "Then, please trust me when I say that you're parents are going to be okay."

"You promise?" she asked in a voice barely above a whisper.

"With my whole heart," he answered. She looked up at him with her big hazel eyes before giving him an awkward hug from across the seat.

"Do you mind if I spend some time reading at your house?" she asked. "I don't want to go home right now."

"Sure," he responded. For the rest of school year, Aria developed her routine from an earlier time, when she spent her after-school hours at Ezra's reading and discussing and sometimes journaling. It brought back old memories and created new moments to think about when home no longer felt familiar.

A month later, she was watching Casablanca in her room when she heard yelling downstairs. She paused the movie and walked over to her closed door. As soon as she heard it, the voices became amplified, and she knocked on her brother's door before entering. She found him curled in a ball on his bed, staring at the wall. He seemed to becoming more like their uncle lately, a man who suffered from severe depression. Aria climbed in bed next to him and laid down, murmuring that everything was going to be okay. The pair fell asleep hugging each other; their parents quietly found them like that the next morning.

Although Aria never discovered the reason, her parents seemed to calm down after that particular yelling-match. Their disagreements became much more controlled and took place in private. By Easter, things seemed almost normal. By the end of the school year, Aria had to break the news to her friends.

"We're moving to Iceland for the year," revealed Aria during lunch on the last day of classes. "It's for my dad's sabbatical."

"Why Iceland?" asked Hanna. "There's nothing there but ice, right?" She shivered at the thought.

"I'm not really sure," admitted Aria. "I haven't exactly been paying attention to my dad's research lately," she finished dryly.

"Surely you must know something, a reason their moving you all the way to Europe," reasoned Spencer. "Right, Em?"

Emily shrugged. "My dad moves all the time with the military, and my mom and I have always stayed in Rosewood. Maybe Mr. Montgomery just wants his family together."

"What aren't you saying, Aria?" demanded Spencer.

"I'm saying," began Aria with a tired sigh, "that my family has been having a lot of problems lately, and maybe this is my parents' way of fixing it. It not like I want to leave. My whole life is here."

"My family had problems too," answered Hanna. "And my dad didn't move us to an island in the middle of nowhere."

"Maybe their situation is different, Hanna," said Emily. "Not every family or every one is the same."

"I'm going to miss you guys," said Aria wistfully. "No more sleepovers or movie nights. I don't get to take Ez—I mean Mr. Fitz, for American Lit. or talk to you guys about boys."

"When do you leave?" asked Spencer.

"July 20," said Aria, the bell to end the class period ringing as she did so, with shrill finality.

The next seven weeks were spent preparing for the time the Montgomery family would be away. Winter clothing was somehow found and purchased in bulk. Aria found herself with piles of new sweaters and jackets and scarves cluttering up her room with new suitcases stacked against a wall. She found herself compartmentalizing her life into boxes, giving every a level of importance to determine whether it would go with her to Iceland or stay behind. Her parents withdrew her from Rosewood High and enrolled her and Mike in an English school in Reykjavik.

Aria noticed that her parents became much more thoughtful and kinder to one another. Ella took a leave of absence from her position at Rosewood High and Byron cleaned out his office. They seemed much more stable than they had in months, and if for nothing other than that reason, Aria was happy that they were moving. Mike didn't comment on the sudden change in his life, nor did he indicate how he was feeling about it one way or another. But his sister noticed that he spend most of June at the gym playing basketball with his friends almost as if he felt like this was his last moment to play the game itself.

June 11 was celebrated with particular pomp and ceremony. Aria's sixteenth birthday was not something that was going to be overlooked. Her friends threw her a surprise party at Hanna's house. There was some dancing, a lot of crying, and large amounts of cake although the most memorable moment, by far, was when Noel Khan surprised Aria with a wet and sloppy kiss on the lips after she blew out her candles. One of the pictures she had gotten of that night, of her and her friends, along with the new camera Ezra had given here earlier in the day were put on the top of the pile of things to take to Iceland.

Two weeks after her birthday, it was Ezra's. Although the festivities were much quieter, they were no less celebratory. It was his twenty-fifth birthday, and he spent part of the afternoon with the Montgomerys, he spent his night in Philadelphia with Hardy. The next day, Aria looked through her bedroom window and saw him slightly hung-over, stumbling around his living room. Smiling mischievously to herself, she went next door and rang the doorbell multiple times before hiding in the bushes. He answered the door, but when no one appeared, he grumbled and went back into his house. Aria giggled to herself and then sobered. She hadn't really thought before what it would mean to no longer live next door to Ezra.

It was with that thought in mind that she found herself in the tree house in his backyard the day before she was scheduled to leave her home. She had no book and no journal in her hands. Instead she sat there inside and looked out the cut out window until Ezra found her, climbing up the rickety steps nailed to the trunk of the tree and crawling into the small space across from Aria. The house shook slightly with his every movement.

"I remember the first time I climbed in her," said Aria without preamble, looking at the green grass below. "I was ten. I thought for sure that Mike would want to come up here and explore with me, but he didn't. Instead, I played up here by myself. After a while, I began to read up here."

"You miss them," said Ezra, and there was no mistaking who he meant.

"I will always miss Grandma and Grandpa," replied Aria. "They left without saying good-bye." She paused for a moment before looking at Ezra. "I don't think anyone asked you how you felt when we said we were leaving. We've become like family, and family doesn't not say good-bye."

Ezra shrugged. "I'm used to people leaving without a good-bye."

"You lost the Springers, too," said Aria, almost to herself, before adding, "Your dad didn't say good-bye, either."

Ezra cleared his throat. "Actually, he did. He died the day after I got to California, and there were things in his will too that meant good-bye. It was my mom that died suddenly."

"You never did tell me what happened."

"She had a brain aneurism. There was nothing anyone could do about it. She died instantly." Silence engulfed them.

"Is this good-bye?" asked Aria, breaking the silence.

Ezra smiled softly. "I think this is until we meet again." They hugged for a moment, and Aria left and then Ezra behind her.

Ezra drove the Montgomery family to the airport in Philadelphia the next day. In the parking lot, there were more hugs, and even a few tears shed. A whole year of holidays, birthdays, happy moments, and sorrowful events would happen before they saw each other again. Aria sent one more message to her friends before turning her phone off for the long trip ahead. Before she knew it, Aria had left Pennsylvania behind.

May 13, 2010

Mike and I just got the news. We're moving to Iceland in July. For an entire year. I can barely believe it. Mom and Dad have been fighting with each other for cats and dogs like months and now they want to live together in a foreign country together? Either they are really desperate or they really need a change of scenery. I want my family to become close again, but I don't know if I want to leave yet or not.

It would be really cool to live in Europe. How many people get to say they've lived in Iceland? But it would mean leaving all of my friends, my entire Rosewood life, behind. I will miss my entire junior year. What will that mean? No homecoming. No prom. It'll mean no waking up in my own bed every morning.

I've heard that in Reykjavik, the sun goes down in October and doesn't come up again until March because the city is so far north. What am I supposed do during all that time? What will I tell Hanna, Spencer, and Emily. How will I tell them?

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