Chapter Text
Five Years Earlier
Daisy Reid was four years old when she learned that adults could cry without making a sound.
She had always thought crying was loud, like when she scraped her knee at the playground, or when she dropped her favorite book in a puddle and thought it was ruined forever.
But the adults at her mother’s funeral didn’t cry like that.
They stood quietly, holding hands.
They looked at her father like they were afraid he might break if they looked away.
Daisy didn’t understand why everyone kept telling her how brave she was.
She wasn’t brave, she was just waiting for her mother to come home.
She still had her mom’s favorite cardigan hanging on the back of a chair in their living room. She still had the book she had been reading to her before bed. She still had a thousand questions she hadn’t gotten answers to.
Four year olds were not supposed to understand forever.
But Daisy Reid had always been different, she noticed things.
She noticed that Uncle Derek stopped making jokes, that Auntie Penelope cried whenever she looked at old pictures.
She noticed that Uncle Rossi brought food to their house every Sunday, even when no one asked him to.
And mostly, she noticed her father.
That was the thing nobody else seemed to notice.
Everyone kept telling Spencer Reid how strong he was, how amazing of a job he was doing, that Abigail would be proud of him.
But Daisy knew the truth, she knew that her daddy wasn’t strong.
He was just really good at pretending.
She sat beside him during the service, her tiny hand wrapped around his fingers.
He hadn’t let go of her once.
Not even once.
“Daddy?”
Spencer looked down at her.
His eyes were tired and there were shadows underneath them that made him look older.
“Yes, sweetheart?”
“When is Mommy coming back?”
For a moment, the smartest man in the room had no answer.
No statistic.
No fact.
No explanation that could make the world make sense again.
So he did the only thing he could: he pulled his daughter closer and whispered the only truth he had left.
“She isn’t.”
Daisy stared at him and nodded.
Even at four years old, she understood something most people never learned: sometimes the hardest truths were the ones nobody wanted to say out loud.
Five years later, someone new would walk into the BAU. Spencer Reid had no idea that the equation he had spent years trying to survive was still missing one variable.