Disclaimer: The characters of Pretty Little Liars do not belong to me.

A/N: For those of you who are reading my current stories, Hot Pink Bubblegum Magenta and Tell Me What You Want to Hear, fret not! I am still working on those stories.

I do plan to update this story with more chapters, but the chapters here will likely be inconsistent as I get through my first watching of Pretty Little Liars. I'm aiming for at least once a month, maybe every couple of weeks or so. Either way, please enjoy!

There is one constant in neighborhoods everywhere.

Everyone knows their neighbors.

Whether everyone is best friends or no one knows each other's name, there is a certain familiarity amongst people that live close to each other. At least one neighbor can always spot whether or not something is out of place. Familiar faces give one another comfort that things are running as they should, and that no matter how bad things can be, on some level they aren't all bad.

The neighbors of the Cavanaughs thought they knew them. They thought they knew that Daniel was a friendly guy that worked too much, that his wife Marion had been an excellent mother before she'd gotten sick and institutionalized, that his new wife and her daughter were nice enough, and that Danie's two children, Toby and Cassandra, were nice enough too, but both were a bit…odd.

What the neighbors didn't know were all of the details.

It's the details that make a neighbor family a family. The stuff that happens behind closed doors that the rest of the neighbors don't know about. One such detail was what exactly happened to Marion Cavanaugh.

Six years earlier, Marion had given birth to a little girl. The birth took everyone by surprise, none more so than Marion and Daniel. They had come to believe that after their ten-year-old son Toby's birth, they couldn't have any more children, so they had resigned themselves to stopping any efforts to do so. Both parents worried that Toby would be jealous, but Toby took to life as a big brother with a shine.

Toby doted on baby Cassandra. He played with her, changed diapers, bathed her, did everything he thought a good big brother should do. The neighbors all saw it and thought that it was because Toby was a good kid. While that was true, they didn't know the real reason.

The real reason Toby was so attentive to his sister was because he noticed that his mother had stopped. She'd stopped caring not only for the baby, but for him too. Marion would spend long days and nights in bed, ignoring both her children except for occasional glimpses of lucidity where she would hug and kiss the both of them. Toby relished those moments, and pretended then that everything was okay.

It was in those days that the neighbors noticed a change in Toby. The friendly, bright little boy turned inward, becoming withdrawn and lonely. Marion's depression got worse, and Daniel started working more and more. Then the bottom fell out from the family.

Marion and Daniel were spotted getting into their car one morning with a now twelve-year-old Toby and almost two-year-old Cassandra. The neighbors just assumed that they were going on some kind of family trip, an assumption that was helped by the fact that no one came back for nearly a week. They didn't see Toby in the backseat trying to keep Cassandra entertained. They didn't see Toby trying to keep Cassandra distracted from his parents fighting and hoping that it gave him a little bit of a distraction too. They didn't see Daniel take Toby and Cassandra to his parents for the better part of the week.

They didn't see that Toby got a bit hopeful that they were going to stay with their grandparents permanently. That Cassandra could have a real mom and a dad who would take care of her all the time, and that maybe he could have the same thing too. As much as he loved Cassandra, Toby knew that he fell way short in some places, and that she deserved so much more. Even if it would kill him to give her that more that she deserved, he'd do it for Cassandra.

The neighbors didn't see the crack, which had already started forming, in the relationship Toby had with his parents, widen ever so slightly when Daniel took Toby out to dinner.

When he asked Toby to keep from the neighbors exactly where his mother had gone.

The neighbors did see the family come back, minus Marion, and act as if nothing had gone wrong. They saw Daniel and Toby and Cassandra leave twice a month and go somewhere, come back, and they saw little Cassandra grow up before their eyes. While she changed in size and height, her attachment to her big brother was as secure as ever.

Then, when Cassandra was four, the neighbors couldn't escape seeing something.

Daniel, Toby, and Cassandra left at the usual time, but they didn't come back that night. They didn't come back the night after that, nor the night after that. Speculation and rumor became the new oxygen of the street. Where was the Cavanaugh family? But the news soon hit the newspapers, leaving everyone shocked for all of five seconds before going about their lives and discussing the newest bit of news behind whispers rather than out loud in the name of being polite.

But oh my goodness. Did you hear? Marion Cavanaugh's been a patient at the Radley Sanitarium all this time. She jumped out of the window during a visit with her children while holding her own baby daughter.

All the neighbors were looking but pretended not to when Cassandra eventually came home. She was pulled out of the car by Toby and placed in a wheelchair. Toby pushed her inside, saying something to her to make the small girl giggle. All the neighbors found this amazing. After all, after such a tragedy of losing a mother and now having a likely permanently disabled daughter, how could anyone be happy?

Cassandra did seem to be happy. She smiled at everyone that waved at her. But the precious little girl was never the same. One of the neighbors found out, during a cookout from a slightly drunk Daniel, exactly what had happened. The fall that Marion had taken out the window had killed her right away. Cassandra, in her father's words hadn't been so lucky. She'd been unconscious when help got to her but was still breathing. Since Cassandra was small for her age, the injuries she sustained were worse than she might have been if she was what Daniel called the right size. Both her legs were broken, and until they healed she was wheelchair bound. The broken legs, Daniel said, he could deal with. But it was what had happened to her brain that caused the majority of her problems.

Cassandra had landed on her head at just the right angle that it had caused massive bleeding, leading to what was ultimately determined to be a stroke. But the doctors at the nearby hospital Cassandra had been sent to had found the stroke damage far too late to fix anything, and the little girl now had to live with brain damage which left her unable to effectively communicate with anyone. She could talk, but her speech was slurred and she often got frustrated and lashed out when she couldn't make herself be understood.

What the neighbor that Daniel was talking to didn't see was Toby by the food table. He was taking care of his baby sister that night, as usual, and he had already fed her and put her to bed. He had sung to her and held her when she cried because her back was hurting, a detail his Dad seemed to have forgotten in all his complaints about Cassandra's condition. Toby found it funny that his dad complained about what was wrong with Cassandra when he had nearly nothing to do with taking care of her. It was Toby who managed all her medications, made sure she got to her appointments all the time, had picked the nanny they now used during the day while Toby was at school. It was Toby who had spent hours learning sign language, then slowly and painstakingly taught it to his sister so she would have someone to talk to. Someone she didn't have to repeat herself for, who would really listen and love her no matter what. Tears stinging his eyes, Toby put down his plate and went into the house, lying down on the bed and crying himself to sleep again.

He missed his mother badly that night, but of course no one saw that.

The neighbors did notice the big moving truck that came just three months after that cookout. They saw the new Mrs. Cavanaugh and her daughter move in, and of course they just had to talk about that. What they didn't see was the war going on inside Toby. He still devoted all his energy to keeping his sister happy and healthy, and so far his efforts seemed to be working. Her speech was better, though she still primarily depended on sign language for day-to-day communication. She still had occasional bouts of back pain, but her legs and back were mostly healed.

And all this progress was in danger of being undone by Jenna.

Toby could see right away that Jenna liked him. But the fact that Toby refused her drove her crazy, and the fact that Cassandra got the most of his attention made her jealous. And as Toby would come to find out, a jealous Jenna was dangerous.

Then came the night that would further crack the Cavanaugh family. The day that something was thrown into the shed, lighting it on fire. Jenna was blinded and sent to the hospital, and Toby was blamed for the fire. Though he'd known that the sentence wouldn't be light, he hit his knees when it came down.

He had to leave Cassandra for a year.

He begged his father to do something about it. Toby would do community service seven days a week until he turned eighteen if he had to. But the thought of leaving Cassandra alone for a year terrified him. The stroke had not only impaired her speech, but she didn't always grasp things when Toby tried to explain them to her. Toby had wondered if he should have his father have Cassandra checked for learning disabilities when she was older. Not because he thought that Cassandra was dumb. Quite the opposite. The little girl was bright. But maybe, if Toby could get a better picture of what was going on in her head, he could help her even more.

But all that fell to the wayside. His father, still convinced Toby had started the fire that night out of spite, told him he was going to the reform school and would serve the entire year. Some distance would be good for Toby. He could focus on himself for once, learn how to be a kid without doing anything like this again, and Cassandra would become a little more independent too. Knowing that he wouldn't get through to his father, Toby did plead with the court officers to give him ten minutes alone with his baby sister in the hallway to explain to her where he was going. The request, much to Toby's grateful surprise, was granted.

There was a neighbor or two in the courthouse handling various other business that day that did spot Toby sitting on a bench, two officers close by, rocking Cassandra in his lap. For a couple of minutes Toby said nothing, just held her and rocked her and wished he could come up with some plan to escape. But he knew that, even if he did run with her and got relatively far, no one would ever stop looking for him and he'd lose Cassandra anyway. Only, if he ran, he'd lose her for good.

At least this way, painful as it was, he'd get her back in a year.

Nine minutes later, all hell broke loose.

Most of the neighbors knew that Cassandra was able to think clearly, she just couldn't get her thoughts out very quickly. She had to listen to what you said, think about it kind of hard, and then take another pause to consider her response. Conversations with anyone other than her brother were often painfully slow and awkward, but she felt that she was improving. It didn't seem to take her quite as long to do things as it used to, and she was as proud of herself as Toby was with her.

What the neighbors didn't know was just how complex Cassandra's insecurities were.

She knew that she was a burden on her family. She saw how tired Toby often got, going to school and coming home, taking care of her before going to bed himself, only to get up and do it all again the next day. She knew that some of the neighbor kids made fun of her, and that they only came to play with her because they felt sorry for her. Not because they really wanted to be her friend.

Cassandra's thinking might have been slow sometimes, but she wasn't stupid.

But Toby's message was crystal clear. He was leaving and wouldn't be back for a really long time. He needed her to be a good girl while he was gone, keep up with her exercises and try her best in school. That he was proud of her and would be back as soon as he possibly could.

Cassandra panicked when she realized that the two police officers were moving closer to Toby and were grabbing his arm to take him away. The normally quiet, docile Cassandra screamed. A primal scream that came from deep within and was nothing but pure, raw grief. Toby couldn't go. He was the only one who knew how to help her when she needed it, knew all the words to her favorite songs, knew how to keep her safe and happy and warm at night and safe from monsters. Daddy and her stepmommy were nice enough, and sure they tried, but they just weren't good at it.

She needed Toby, or she wasn't safe, and there was no way anyone was going to take him away.

So Cassandra tried to fight. She started to kick and push the officers away, but Toby did what he always did the rare times she started to get overwhelmed and throw a fit. He grabbed her hands and held them, hard but not too hard and firmly told her to look at him. That tone broached no argument from Cassandra. She knew that she had to listen, whether she liked it or not.

"If I let your hands go, do you promise to do nothing but sign to me? No more hitting or scratching?"

Cassandra nodded furiously, tears still streaming, and frantically signed T come home.

I can't baby. I'm sorry. I have to go.

T come home.

I love you.

T come home.

Please say it back. I love you.

T come home NOW!

Knowing Cassandra was overwhelmed and did love him, but was as terrified as he was at the moment, Toby looked to his father and nodded at Cassandra. Daniel came over and picked up the distraught kindergartner, who continued to repeatedly sign T come home, T come home, T come home. The hallway was long and narrow, so Daniel decided to wait until Toby had left to walk out. He sat down on a bench and tried to comfort his little daughter, something he found himself powerless to do. In Cassandra's misery and his own inability to sign, he missed the fact that what she was signing changed.

T left me.

The next year was miserable for the family. Everyone could see it. Cassandra was a wreck without her brother. She was compliant, but her quietness fell to such new levels that Daniel was worried she was becoming as depressed as her late mother had. The only time she lit up was during the three night a week video calls with Toby. Daniel often felt jealous of Toby's ability to have a relationship with Cassandra, and that jealousy only deepened over the weeks. Cassandra mostly signed to him, but Toby would respond by talking, which in turn helped strengthen Cassandra's speech even more. But every week, the call ended the same. Cassandra would ask her brother T come home?

"Soon, cuppy cake. Very soon."

Cassandra would sign off with I love you T and Toby would be gone. Things would go back to their new normal after that.

Except for tonight.

Tonight, there was a different atmosphere in the Cavanaugh household. Toby had insisted on keep his homecoming a surprise, so he hadn't told Cassandra he was coming. He made it to the house with Daniel around midnight, and Toby walked upstairs. The first place he stopped, of course, was Cassandra's bedroom to check on her. He felt his panic rise a bit when she wasn't in her bed, only to be replaced by intense guilt when his father told him where she was.

"She sleeps on your bed."

Toby opened his bedroom door and, sure enough, there she was. Curled up in the corner of the bed, her back facing the wall, Cassandra was fast asleep. Toby noticed she had brought a picture of him and placed it next to the bed, something that nearly made him cry as he'd done the same thing with her picture during his time away. In a somewhat uncharacteristic moment of understanding and compassion, Daniel placed a hand on his son's shoulder.

"Go ahead. Wake her up, I know you want to."

Toby smiled and sat on the edge of the bed. Cassandra, able to sleep through almost anything, didn't move a muscle. Toby picked her up and sat her on his lap. Cassandra whined a little, sat up, rubbed her eyes, and looked into the smiling Toby's face. She didn't at first register what she was seeing. Then, her eyes grew wide in recognition and she furiously signed again T come home?

"Yes." Toby said. "I'm home, baby."

Cassandra let out a squeal of excitement before jumping into his arms for a hug. For a moment, Toby felt at peace for the first time in months. His father wished them both a good before going down the hall to check on Jenna and join his wife.

The neighbors might see a lot. But if they saw the scene in the Cavanaugh living room now, Toby decided, it might actually do them some good.