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February 14th

"You were in love with her?"

Spencer blinks at him, as if she's confused by the question. "No one's ever asked me that before," she says.

"But it's true, isn't it?" he prompts.

She nods. "I loved her with everything I had."

Her voice is steady, despite the tears that are still spilling down her face. He surveys her carefully. He's seen many people who claimed to be in love – it was a surprisingly common way people would try to throw blame away from themselves – and he's become skilled in being able to tell whether these declarations of love were true. All of the signs about this girl imply that she's not lying.

"How long?" he asks.

She doesn't need him to elaborate. "Three hundred eighty nine days," she says. "Tomorrow will be three hundred ninety."

Her certainty stirs something in him. He's forgotten what it's like to be so sure of your love for someone you don't even consider not loving them. He'd felt that, once, with his wife. Each day was just a chance to fall more in love with her. And here Spencer was, having been in love with this Aria girl for over a year… and still looking forward to the next day of loving her. He missed that feeling.

"Did you two ever date?" he asks.

He wonders why he's so interested. This investigation is about the body they found her with, not about her feelings for Aria, whoever she is. But he finds himself intrigued by the story, wanting to know how it ends. And she seems willing, although reluctant, to talk about it. Maybe if he can keep her talking long enough, she'll snap out of her state of shock and be able to tell her what happened tonight.

"We did."

She doesn't sound happy. If anything she sounds regretful. But if she'd loved her, why would she have regretted dating her? Suddenly something clicks. She was my everything. Was. As in, past tense. So either they'd broken up, or something even worse had happened.

"Yeah?" he says, hoping – but not expecting – that she'll volunteer more information. To his astonishment, she does.

"We were in a relationship for almost three months," Spencer says. "Not long after we started college, I admitted that I had feelings for her. I didn't expect anything to come out of it, but…"

"Something did," he says.

"Yeah." She brushes some hair back from her face, then lets her hand fall back onto her lap. She looks at it, rubbing a stain that's either dirt or blood. "She asked me out. I said yes, of course. I was thrilled."

"What happened then?"

She shrugs. "We dated."

There's something about her manner that just seems off. If she'd been as in love as she claimed, shouldn't she have expressed some joy at reliving the memory of her love asking her out?

He runs a hand along the edge of the desk, feeling the small nicks that witnesses and suspects had made over the years. If you dug your fingers hard enough into the wood it would leave a mark, and if you were left alone in the room you might chip at it until it formed a crack or a hole.

"But it didn't work out?" he says when it becomes clear Spencer isn't going to speak.

"I loved her," Spencer says, "but she never loved me."

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