Hello everyone. I am so sorry that it's taken me this long to post again. This chapter took forever, but I'm somewhat pleased with it, so there's that. Please keep reviewing, I love to hear what you all have to say, and hopefully I'll post the next chapter soon. Probably much sooner, because now I can use this as a way to procrastinate reading for class, which starts tomorrow. Lemme know what y'all think!

"The weekend went too fast," Tooth mutters from her seat next to me on the floor of my now-empty room.

"I know."

"Tell me again why you have to leave?" It's North's question, and I cringe at having to answer it. I never really explained my situation to him and the other two guys who have become my close friends. I told Tooth because I had to; I never felt it necessary to explain to the others.

"Well, it's complicated," I say, and exchange a glance with Tooth. She nods slowly. I know what she's trying to convey with the movement: It's okay, you can tell them, but I still have reservations about letting my secret out…again. I'm uncomfortable with the fact that I'll be almost tripling the number of people who know my true identity.

But, then again, they are the only friends I have now. And they deserve to know.

Sandy – by far the most observant of the three guys – caught my silent exchange with Tooth and now eyes me curiously. I look right at him and he just gives me an encouraging smile. I smile back.

"If I'm going to explain this to you, I'm going to have to take you back a few years."

Sandy winks at me and settles against the wall with his arms folded across his chest. Bunny and North, who are both lying on the ground, raise their heads to me in interest, but don't move. "Go for it," Bunny says, "we're all ears, mate."

Here we go. I take a deep breath and begin. "So do you guys remember when I first got here, and one of our first conversations was about that girl from Burgess whose friends got into the ice skating accident?" I look first at North, then Bunny, then Sandy, and I can see the realization slowly start to creep into their expressions. But I press on before they get the chance to figure it out for themselves. "That was me. I'm Elsa Winters."

It dawns on me that even though I don't like telling people who I am, for obvious reasons, I do enjoy seeing the look of surprise on their faces when they find out.

Bunny blinks several times in rapid succession, and North shakes his head back and forth slowly. Sandy didn't really respond at all, he's just still giving me a little smile. Then Bunny breaks the short silence.

"You're Elsa?"

"I am."

"Prove it."

"And how exactly do you want me to do that?"

He goes silent, looks down, and then starts typing frantically into his phone. North takes this moment to pose another question: "So why did you have to come to Arendelle in the first place?"

I look down at the carpet and pick at it. "Jack's mom was so angry when he and his little sister were hospitalized. She told my parents that she was going to put a restraining order on me if I ever talked to him again. But besides that, just the way people started treating me, like they were scared of me. I couldn't live like that."

"Did she do it?"

"Do what?"

"File a restraining order?"

"No, I don't think so."

"But the threat worked."

I can't help but give a wry grin at that. "Yeah, I guess it did."

"So…wait a second." Bunny's finally come back to the conversation, and is holding his phone up to my face. On the screen is the picture of me that the Burgess Bulletin had put up when the incident was still breaking news. "You don't look anything like the picture of Elsa that we saw in the paper."

"Well, first of all, that picture is now three years old, and hopefully I've changed since then. When I moved, I changed my hair color from blonde to brown, and my eye color from blue to green. These are contacts," I say, gesturing to my eyes, "and my hair has been dyed."

"I wonder what you would look like with your natural hair and eyes back."

I laugh. "I've wondered that, too, but it's not so hard to imagine."

Bunny seems thoughtful when he responds. "No, it's not really."

As an afterthought, I add in: "And don't you dare tell anyone about this, okay?" I fix each of the guys with my stern Clara stare, part of my Ice Queen persona, if you will, and then continue. "You four are the only ones that I've told, in my three years of being Clara. And I don't want it getting out until I'm ready for it to be. That includes avoiding any questions that Jack may ask you about it. Got it?"

Once they all agree, again, to my terms and conditions, I stand up, and right at that moment, there's a knock on my door. "Elsa?" my mom asks as she peeks her head around the door frame. "We're almost ready to go sweetie, so make your goodbyes for now."

"Okay," I say, and give her a halfhearted smile. I don't want to go. I don't want to leave these people that I've gotten to know and come to love over the past three years. But it's not like I'm leaving forever. We can still visit each other.

"Well, this is it," I say, turning back towards my friends.

I give each of them a hug, Tooth longest, and we head downstairs to the front porch. My parents' car is parked in the driveway, and all of my stuff has already been loaded, so all we have to do is pile in ourselves and get on the road. I turn back to my friends again. "I'll see you guys soon, okay?"

"Okay." This time, it's Sandy who spoke, and we all turn to him in amazement. I've never heard him speak, and he looks pretty surprised himself at the sound. He just shrugs, falling back into his natural silence.

A few minutes later, sitting in the back seat of the car and heading back to Burgess, I bow my head and whisper out loud, "I'm going home." But the nervous feeling in my stomach doesn't make me feel very good about it.

When we reach my old home, I get out of the car and just stare at the house. Mom and dad are bustling around behind me, removing boxes from the trunk and from the back seat, and I should probably be helping them, but I just stand and stare. I could do this forever, but then the front door opens and an Anna I've never seen before bounces out of the house. I switch my stare from the house to my little sister. She looks exactly like I knew she would. Red hair, in two braids, like it always is, and sparkling bluish-green eyes. A smile on her face, probably permanent, and the bouncing step of a true lover of the world and all that is in it. She stops right in front of me and, without saying a word, throws her arms around me. Before I can return the hug, it's over.

"Hi, I'm Anna. You must be Clara."

"That's me," I say quietly, and I give her a timid smile. For some strange reason, I'm suddenly shy. Why should I be shy around my own sister?

"I hope you like living with us. I'm so glad that you're here! I've always wished I had an older sister," she starts, then frowns suddenly and corrects herself. "Well, I mean, I already have an older sister, but I haven't seen her for a long time, and…"

I put my hand up and laugh a little. "I know what you mean, I'm glad to be here too."

She smiles again, this time a sad smile. "I'm so sorry about Angie and Kevin."

I flinch at their names. "Thank you." I don't know what else to say, and apparently neither does Anna. We stand together awkwardly until my dad comes to the rescue. "Anna, Clara, would you mind helping us carry some of this up to your bedroom?"

As we move back and forth from house to car, I can't stop thinking about how strange it is to be back home, but still have no one know who I am. If my dad wasn't calling me 'Clara' every five minutes, it would almost feel like nothing had changed at all, like I had never left. Well, that and the fact that I don't know anything about my sister anymore.

Once all of my stuff is back in my old room, Anna insists on staying to help me put things away and reorganize. "Between the two of us, we can get you all settled in in no time!" she says enthusiastically, ignoring my protests that she doesn't have to help me. My parents mysteriously disappeared when Anna first offered to help, I think they want to give us some time alone to get to know each other again.

It's a good thing my wardrobe has changed since I left, I think to myself as we unpack together. It would be really strange if she started to recognize some of my possessions as ones that her lost sister owned. I've put some thought into when I want to tell Anna about who I really am, and I couldn't make a decision. She'll probably be the first I tell, in the end, but when that will be, I have no idea.

I'm jerked out of my thoughts by a question. "Clara? Do you want all of these to be hung up in the closet?"

"Sure, I guess. Let's just find a place for everything and then I'll switch it later if I feel like it."

"Sounds good." She gives me a quick smile and starts hanging things in the closet, and I turn back to making the bed when sudden silence from the other end of the room makes me look back. Since we started unpacking, Anna's endless chatter has become a constant, until now. My sister has disappeared into the closet.

"Anna?"

"Clara, come here!" she says excitedly.

I cross over to the closet in a few big steps and see Anna on her hands and knees, toward the back left corner, carefully pressing her hands against the floor. "What did you find?" I ask, although I think I already know the answer.

"Shhh…" she says quietly, and then places her ear to the floor as well. "I haven't been in here since Elsa left," she says in a whisper. Just then, the floorboard lifts, and Anna lets out a shriek of triumph. "Now we'll see what's in here…what's this?" she says, lifting out the pile of letters that I left there three years ago. The envelopes are just like I left them, obviously no one found the secret stash.

Before I can say anything or react in any way, Anna gives another little yell. "These are…Clara! These are letters! Letters that Elsa wrote! She must have left them here when she left…and no one ever found them. Why didn't I think of looking in here? One for Rapunzel, Merida, Flynn, Hiccup, Sophie, Jack…me."

I sneak a glance at her face; even in the darkness of the closet, with only the sunlight from the window faintly making its way in, I can see the tears forming in her eyes. It's so easy to forget that Anna was probably hurt the most from my disappearance, she hides it so well, she's always so happy. I don't know what to do, though. Should I comfort her? Should I just give her some time?

Before I can do anything, though, Anna rips open her letter. It's a long one, probably the longest of the notes I left in the secret stash, although Jack's rivals Anna's in length. Despite the pages I've written, she seems to get through it pretty quickly, but then she goes back to the beginning and rereads. While this is happening, I sift through the other letters, trying to remember what I wrote in them. I can't. I want to open them and look, but that would mean breaking the seals, and I don't want to do that.

After a solid fifteen minutes, Anna puts her letter back in the envelope and looks up at me. "Clara, I'm sorry," she says, and wipes some tears from her cheeks.

I give her a small smile. "You don't have anything to apologize for."

"It's just…when Elsa left, she never said goodbye to me. I thought she was angry with me or something, but this letter…I wish I had found it sooner." I nod, but don't say anything, and she continues. "All this time, never hearing a word from her…I don't understand how she could forget me like that. How she could leave me."

Every word she says is stabbing me with guilt. What have I done to my little sister?

Before I can stop myself or think about my actions, I wrap Anna up in a hug, a big bear hug like the ones our dad used to give us when he got home from work. She cries into my shoulder, and we don't move. When her sobs start getting louder, I stroke her hair with my free hand. "It's okay, it's okay," I say, over and over.

"I miss her."

"She misses you too, Anna, I'm sure she does. And I can't believe for a second that anyone who's ever met you could forget you." It feels strange to be in this situation. Just tell her. Why won't you tell her? You see what it's done to her?

I didn't realize she would be so hurt by this.

Fix it. Now.

I pull slightly back from Anna and cup her tear-stained face in my hands. "Anna, leaving you was the hardest thing your sister ever had to do. And don't think for a second that she doesn't love you, because she does. She loves you and misses you more than you know."

The world freezes. Anna's eyes, which were still red from crying, slowly lose their look of grief as she stares into mine. I read once that the eyes are the gateway to the soul, but I don't think I understood what that meant until this very moment. I see a flood of emotions pass through her eyes: sadness, loneliness, anger, resentment, love, and then finally, recognition. She reaches a hand up and lightly touches my cheek.

"Elsa?"