Ali and Chloe Forever (Book 1)

Chapter 4: A Trip Down Memory Lane

The next morning, Alison sat with her boyfriend, Nicholas Maxwell, on the floor of an empty town house in Rosewood, Pennsylvania, a suburban Philadelphia town in which she'd spent several years of her life. The room was dark, and the only items in it were a mattress, ratty flannel blankets, an old TV someone had abandoned, and food Nick had shoplifted from the nearby Wawa mini-mart. The air smelled dusty and sour, which reminded Ali of The Radley and The Preserve at Addison-Stevens, the mental hospitals in which she'd been trapped for years. Still, it would do for a while. It just felt good to be free.

Ali turned and looked back at Chloe, who was asleep on the mattress. Surprisingly, Chloe had remained unconscious since Ali had taken her last night. Ali had been worried that Chloe would wake up while she and Nick were taking her to their hideout—she didn't want to have to keep drugging Chloe—but Chloe never woke up. When they got to the townhouse, they pulled Chloe out of the trunk of Nick's car and carried her into the room they were in now. Ali had been the one to tuck her in and crawl into bed with her, just like when they were little kids.

Then, an hour ago, Ali knelt on the floor and watched Chloe as she slept. She knew Chloe was going to wake up soon. And she couldn't wait because she had everything planned out.

She didn't expect Chloe to come a day early, but she'd been overjoyed at the thought of seeing her little sister again. Then, when Chloe ran away, it pissed her off. But more than anything else, it hurt her feelings. Sure, she was already planning on kidnapping Chloe, but she wasn't going to hurt her. Ali loved her. And she was going to make sure Chloe knew it.

Now Ali turned back to the TV. "Turn it up," she said, gesturing toward the television.

Nick adjusted the dial. They were stealing electricity and cable from the main transformer in the complex—for a rich kid, Nick was great at ripping off The Man. The screen showed a live feed of police officers searching through a pile of rubble at Ali's family's vacation home in the Pocono Mountains. Ali knew full well what they'd been looking for: her. Or, more specifically, her bones.

"We're still searching," the chief of police said to an interviewer. "There was no way Ms. DiLaurentis survived that blast."

Ali snickered. Idiots.

Nick looked at her worriedly. "Are you okay?" He took her hand. "We can watch something else if you want."

Ali pulled the hoodie Nick had stolen from Target over her head, still self-conscious about the oozing burns on her face. They would heal—Nick had arranged for a nurse to come once a day—but she would never be as pretty as she once was. "Don't change it," she demanded. "I don't want any more surprises."

She'd already been surprised enough. Her foolproof plan of pretending to incinerate Courtney and the four girls, along with Melissa Hastings and Ian Thomas's body, inside her family's mountain house and then slipping into the night with Chloe, never to be seen again, had backfired. Spencer Hastings, Emily Fields, Aria Montgomery, and Hanna Marin had escaped the house virtually unharmed with Courtney and Chloe while she was in a lot of pain. Somehow the cops had found the letter Ali had slipped under their door—it was in the grass outside the house. The letter confessed everything—that she was Ali, a girl falsely imprisoned in a mental hospital who wanted nothing more than to have her little sister, Chloe, love her the way she did them. That she'd planned on killing Courtney on the night of her seventh-grade graduation. That she'd killed Ian Thomas and Jenna Cavanaugh. And that she'd duped the girls into trusting her, and that she was going to kill them, too.

But Ali didn't kill them. She'd let them go, only because the person she loved the most brought out the good in her.

As luck would have it, the reporter on TV, a waxy-looking idiot with ugly fuchsia lipstick, was rehashing what the news was calling the Dark DiLaurentis Secrets—everything in that letter. "If she had lived, Miss DiLaurentis would be going to prison for the rest of her life for all the crimes she'd committed," she said gravely.