Chapter 79*

Aria's POV*

My mom was quietly fuming in the car ride home from the hospital. The way her jaw clenched so hard, that I could see the muscles standing out rigid against her cheeks and jawline. I knew she was holding it back. Whatever she needed to talk to me about, whatever piece from tonight had pushed her over the edge. She had been so quiet since the hospital. Dread was pooling in my stomach, making my want to puke again. Anticipation was killing me. Her gaze was fixed directly on the road, passed the officers that were taking us home from the hospital. I figured if we had been in her car, she would have already lost her composure and started in on me.

She thanked the officer who let her out of the back of the squad car with a terse acknowledgement. Her tone was clipped and she didn't look back to me to see if I was following. Thankfully my dad's car wasn't back yet. Which at least meant that he and Mike were still at the sports banquet and wouldn't be here to witness this. I trailed after my mom, slow enough to try and delay the inevitable argument that was due to come, but not so much that the officers watching us would realize how much I didn't want to go inside. At least we would be alone for this argument. The door closed behind me.

My mom was standing in the living room, facing away from me, her body completely rigid. The tension in the air was too much for me to handle. The reminder of the foul taste still lingering in my mouth from the hospital, despite rinsing my mouth out when I got into a private room, made me want to just head upstairs and brush my teeth.

"I'm going to go brush my teeth." I informed, dropping my purse onto the table next to the stairs, hoping maybe whatever this was going to be could be avoided.

"Were you ever going to tell me?" her voice was cold, too calm.

I paused my foot hovering over the bottom step of the stairs. "Tell you what?"

It was a stupid response. But there were so many things that she could be meaning right now.

"Don't do that." she turned to face me, her eyes watering despite the blaze of anger visible in them. "Don't pretend that nothing is going on."

"Sorry. I just…." I started, wanting to explain that I wasn't sure what specific thing she was talking about, but she cut me off.

"Were you ever going to tell me?" she repeated, her mouth tight, her voice had raised fractionally higher. The anger tightening her face.

I wanted to lie. Wanted to protect her. I never wanted to hurt her. Felt too responsible for fixing everything in my family. How could I share what had happened to me? Or what I had done? There was a gulf between her life and mine. She was living a normal single existence. Sure, it wasn't the life that she had probably imagined growing up, who ever thinks that they're going to separate from their husband, after all. But even that felt like it was my fault. Everything bad about her life had been because of me.

"No." I responded, not able to pass a lie off and just settling for the truth.

"No?" she repeated back.

"No, I wasn't." I gave a shake of my head, I didn't want to have this conversation. Didn't want to have to justify not sharing things with her.

"Why not?" she accused, pink flaring on her cheeks in anger.

"You didn't need to know."

"Of course I do." she snapped back, her anger twisting her face, "I'm still your mother, don't I deserve to know what's happening to my daughter."

"Mom, it's not that." I tried to reason, pushing down the frustration that we had to have this argument now. I felt awful, exhausted and disgusting. My clothes didn't feel enough to shelter me from the world. And more than anything I wanted to go upstairs and collapse in the shower. Hide myself in the safety of the burning heat, where I could scorch my nerves and make them forget they ever touched that metal table. The icy glass. The cold that still tried to smother the life out of me.

"I'm trying to protect you, Aria. How can I do that when you never tell me what's going on? I need to know what to protect you from."

"Don't do that." I shot back, unable to contain the anger that had been building without my awareness. "That hasn't been your job in a long time."

"Because you never tell me anything. I don't know when to look out for danger. You disappear into your room. And shut down any time we try to talk to you about what happened." her voice pitched up in annoyance.

"Because you don't need to know. It's my life. Not yours." I shot back, anger pushing me further than I had ever gone with my parents before.

"What did I do, Aria? What could I have possibly done?" she was basically pleading, eyes wide in her desperation to know what happened to me.

"You left!" I accused, voice raising too high, the police were sure to hear us.

"You sent me away." she shot back. "You basically packed my bags and sent me to Vienna, how can you keep holding that against me?"

"Because I was trying to protect you."

"Sending me away wasn't to protect me." she argued, turning defensive. "You just wanted me gone."

"Really? Did you forget about the bees in your car? Or about how someone drove a car into Emily's house? Or Ashley Marin going to jail?"

"Aria." she tried to cut in, but I was on a tear now.

"Sending you away was the only way to protect you." I laid it out for her in a way that I never had before. Never been able to share with her.

"Why didn't you tell me?" her voice had dropped low, surprised that I had sent her away for her own protection.

How could she assume anything else? I did everything to take care of my family. I had for years. It had only been recently that I had started trying to carve out some measure of my own happiness. Didn't she understand that? Didn't she see everything that I had done for her? The things that I had given up?

"To keep you safe!" I shouted. "Don't you get that?"

"It's not your job to keep me safe." she lied, like it hadn't always fallen on me to hold our family together when things started to crumble.

"Really, mom? It's not?" I turned it back on her. " Cause as far as I remember, whenever I don't you take off. You left us when you found out about Meredith."

"That's not fair."

"No, what's not fair is that I have to hold this family together. I have to be the one who takes Mike to school on days that you and dad forget about his practices. Or you get too caught up in your lives to even remember that we're your children. And need you."

"Aria,"

"No! I'm tired of this. Tired of pretending that we're a happy family when you're desperate to just drop us and leave. I saw you tonight. You left me alone. If Jason hadn't basically forced you to go with me you would have left me tonight too."

"I didn't leave you though. I came with." she tried to argue, but I shook my head.

"Oh yeah? Is that why I had to do the EKG alone? Stripped half naked in a room with strangers. Shivering in the fucking cold. Completely alone." I could feel the water coming to my eyes now, the fear of that isolation creeping back over me again. It wasn't just that I was hurt, I was terrified.

" I needed a few minutes to process." she tried to argue, to explain away her absence.

"You needed time to process. You?" I threw back at her.

"Did you think that maybe I didn't want to be alone. That I'm terrified everytime I get left alone somewhere."

"No, because you never tell me what happened." she argued back, like she couldn't understand what had happened. Wouldn't even try to put it together if I didn't spell it out for her.

"I was raped. Is that what you want to hear? That he strangled me when I didn't do what he wanted? Or that if I said that I loved you more than dad he would call me a liar and shock me until I screamed?" my breathing was ragged, and she was just standing there. Waiting for me to go on.

"Or how about how I was locked in my own room for weeks. Separated from the other girls with the only human contact when he came in and fucked me? Or beat me if I dared to make a noise?"

"Of course not, sweetie." she tried to backtrack.

"No, you don't want to hear about that? Or how about how he gave me a bottle of pills to kill myself? Is that what you want to know? What you need to protect me?" I spit out, not giving her a chance to respond. "Or how when I woke up on that autopsy table and I felt like every part of my body was frozen, I thought for a minute that I was with you? Waiting in the cold and dark in Iceland again, curled up safely with my family, watching for the Northern Lights? And then I opened my eyes to a nightmare that just wouldn't end."

I could feel my entire body shaking at this point, arms wrapping around my ribs to try and hold any hint of heat in my body in. To the point that it hurt my bruised ribs, ones that I had thought had already healed, but were apparently no match to the continuous wretching and shaking that I was constantly doing.

"Or that when I made it back to my room after waking up in nothing but a sheet it was so cold that I thought I was going to freeze to death as I tried to get across broken glass to get to my bed? That when I couldn't handle the pain in my feet anymore, couldn't support my weight one second longer, I collapsed and had to crawl across it?"

"Aria," she tried again, but I couldn't handle that look right now. Couldn't handle having this conversation ever again. I was pissed, and tired, and just wanted to go to bed. And instead we were dragging this out.

"Or how I'm still cold all the time. And I can't stand to have my skin exposed?"

"Sweetie, why didn't you tell me?" she tried again, her tone too soft and gentle right now. "We could have done something."

"It wouldn't have made anything better." I dismissed, knowing the threats that Charles had lobbied against us all. The real reason that I hadn't been able to share anything with my parents.

"Before this, why didn't you say anything when this started up again? I could have helped." she explained like it actually made a difference, she just didn't understand.

"I couldn't tell you." I clarified, shaking away her arguments.

"I would have believed you. I will always believe you." she soothed, but she just didn't understand.

It wasn't about her believing me. That hadn't been the issue. That was the smallest part. Nothing that either of us could have done would change anything. She didn't know Charles the way that I did. Didn't understand that just knowing about it didn't make it go away. Didn't stop the horrors he could accomplish.

"You can't stop Charles. It's just not possible." I rushed out, hoping she might understand.

"Aria, he's just one man." she argued, completely missing the point. "If I had just known, I could have done something."

But he wasn't just one man. Charles was a living nightmare. And anytime we thought it was just one person behind this, two more would pop up wrecking havoc in our lives. He wasn't limited by the resources of just being one person, there was always a team behind things.

"Why do you keep saying that?" she questioned, annoyance flaring at my lack of going along with her. "Of course it would have mattered. Maybe we could have caught him ages ago."

I was pissed that she wasn't listening. Didn't care enough to listen to me about my experience. That she was blaming me for everything that happened. She wouldn't have been able to do anything to help us. Would have just ended up with her life falling apart or worse, in the hospital. She would have right away wanted to go to the police, shown them all the evidence we had against him. And just like when we had tried, everything would have disappeared before our eyes and she'd have been left looking foolish trying to convince the police about the nightmare stalker in our lives.

"It's not like that." I scoffed, dismissing her feeling that she would have been able to prevent anything. "You can't catch him."

"We could have tried." she just kept pushing. "Maybe it would have been different."

"It wouldn't have made anything better. Because I still have to keep you safe. Protect you, and dad, and Mike. That no matter what I go through, that's still my job." my voice had grown cold and hoarse at this point, throat burning with the volume that I had forced through it. It didn't feel like it was worth it to keep arguing. The energy for the fight had sapped out of me.

"No, it's my job to protect you." she argued again. "It's just every time I try to help you, you pull away. Act like I'm what you're afraid of."

"You're not what I'm afraid of."

"I'm not? Cause tonight when I tried to help you, you backed away. Flinched into Jason DiLaurentis." I had never heard her spit his name with that level of venom before.

"Leave Jason out of this." my voice went flat, face losing the animation. She wasn't going to blame on of the only people who had been there for me without hesitation this whole time. Who actually helped me.

"How can I? He's part of that awful family. The ones who hurt you, his brother kidnapped you." the anger was rising in her again, her spine straightening again after my accusations had shrunk her down.

"Jason is my friend. And has been helping me. He actually cares about me. Makes me feel safe." I was on the defensive again. "And I thought you liked Jason."

"That doesn't change the fact that if you weren't friends with his sister, this never would have happened to you. I always thought it was just Ali that was trouble, but it's that whole family."

"You can't blame Ali and Jason for what Charles did to me. This had nothing to do with them."

"How can you say that, Aria? When Jason is the one who took you to that clinic? How is he not involved in this?"

"He took me because I asked him. And so I would have someone there to support me. Someone who understood that I needed support and not to do the supporting for once."

"I would have supported you. But you didn't even tell me you were pregnant. How could I have been there, when you don't tell me."

"I didn't want you there." I threw out and the words hung in the air for one awful instant.

"Of course you didn't. Just like you didn't want me there tonight." she eyed me over. "I saw it in your face, Aria. If the option was me or Jason going with you, you would have preferred he go with you."

"I wanted you both." I tried to counter.

"No, you wanted Jason. Because you obviously trust him more than me."

"Of course I do!"

"Why, Aria?" her eyes were watering now, face blotchy and red. "Why do you trust him more than your own family?"

"Because he actually knows me."

"I know you! You're my daughter."

"Stop saying that." my voice dropped low, away from the shouting we had been doing. "That doesn't change anything."

"No matter what, you will always be my daughter. Don't you know that?"

"No I wouldn't. If you actually knew me, you would run."

"Aria, there is nothing you could do to make me stop loving you."

"We blinded Jenna." I called her bluff, watching her face for the moment of disgust that I knew was coming.

"No you didn't. That was Toby." she was sliding into denial now, shutting down at what I had just told her.

"No, it was us. Ali threw the stink bomb into the shack and blackmailed Toby into taking the fall for us." I explained it so calmly, it honestly had stopped fazing me after a while. And I needed her to understand just what we were capable of.

"Aria" she started, and I knew that she was going to try to argue or diminish what I was saying.

"I trashed dad's office and blamed Meredith."

"I know, sweetie." she was trying to argue again, I couldn't take it though.

"I killed Shana."

The words hung in the air. Filling the silence around us, and I watched her face freeze, trying to comprehend what I had just said.

"What he did to us? We deserved. I deserved." I was crying at this point, way past my breaking point.

"So just go, Mom. Pull the ripcord and save yourself." I was practically pleading. "Don't get pulled into my mess. Someone should be happy at least."

She didn't say anything. Didn't move to comfort me. I didn't deserve it anyway. She moved past me to the door. The only sound her heels against the hardwood. And then the door opened. And closed.

And she left.

End Chapter*

So this one is a bit shorter than they've been lately. But I thought this was a good place to stop at. And the next one will be longer.

Let me know what you think.