BAD LIAR ━━ pretty little liars

3.19

"Okay—" Halle walked towards them. In her hand, she bore a large roll of canvas paper and a thick notebook. "My folks are watching Jeopardy, we're good in here," she said. Rarely was the door between the main house and the kitchen ever shut. Halle's friends could only recalled one time prior where it had been. "Are you sure you wanna do this?"

The three girls shiftily looked around. Their eyes flitted between one another, visibly nervous while they hid their fears from the group. Although, they were poorly hidden. All of them, Halle included, were noticeable terrified of the darker side to the mystery that has already caused them so much pain. It was agony repeating, dredging up that history they were never really past yet.

Emily spoke first. She was the one who had brought this up again. "We have to, right?" she said, and Halle nodded sensitively.

The most crippled with worry, Aria, writhed in the rich-wood chair. "Spencer's not here," she reasoned.

"Well, Spencer's not exactly Spencer right now," snarked Hanna. "Not like she'd be any help."

To prepare them, Halle began with a caution to the table. "If we do this, there's no turning back." She said, "We all have to agree."

"Then we agree," Hanna replied.

"Same," said Emily.

They each turned to Aria, who made herself small in her seat. The petite girl didn't speak, but she gave a clear nod and swallowed back her nerves afterwards.

"Okay, then." Halle stepped forward with the items she had carried in with her. She put them down onto the wooden surface. "Catch up," she ordered, and the girls immediately filled with confusion at the action itself.

Knitting her brows together, Aria reached for the notebook and took it in her grasp. It was heavier than she expected and jagged edges of papers stuck out jabbed into her skin. "What's this?" she asked.

"Every interaction with A I've ever had," Halle stated as a matter of fact. The second the confession left her, her friends' eyes shot up to her. It shocked them, suspended into disbelief, overwhelmed by the attention to detail.

"You're kidding," Aria said in awe. She flipped the notebook and started flicking through pages upon pages of evidence. "You did this?"

Hanna extended up from her seat, inspecting it. "This is seriously very Spencer of you," she remarked.

"It's very hypomanic of me, actually," Halle responded with some dry humour. "It's like tunnel-vision. Once my mind is set, it's kind of the only thing I can think of." She sighed heavily and revealed to them, surprising them further, "I did most of it the past summer. While Spencer focused on rebuilding whatever of A's lair she could remember in that program of hers—" her eyes subconsciously rolled as she droned on, "I focused on this." Halle explained, "After we found the Lost Woods empty,  I knew A's proof was gone. We ain't ever getting that back, but we had something better. This," she stated, and urged them to take a better look.

Aria kept searching through the glued-in screenshots and the blue inked notes Halle had made beside them. Her first text, Ian's suicide letter with Emily's annotations where she figured out it was made up of A-texts, a photograph of the threat on Dr Sullivan's wall, Halle's own obsessive research for the Black Swan costumes, screenshots of medical websites on memory lapses with alcohol and weed.

Nodding along, as her friends filled with amazement, Halle said, "Yeah, that's everything, I think." She mentioned, "I left spaces for what I couldn't remember of what A sent to you guys. We can add them if you want."

"This is super obsessive," Hanna commented, stopping on a page to turn down one of the flaps to see more of Halle's handwriting. There were questions she had marked down. They were ones they all shared but never knew the answers to and then the few answers they had were scrawled in tiny, squashed pen beside them.