She wasn't supposed to be his daughter.
He stared numbly at the sunlight filtering through the blinds. The thought had haunted him all the way in Berlin, over the Atlantic, before the press conference, oh, the press conference, but in this room… in his daughter's room…
It killed him.
He'd always assumed she was her child, and her child alone, as if genetics could somehow bend in the face of her deepest wish, as he would and did. But he had assumed and now he had let her baby be hurt, be lost, be out there where any creep or slime ball could get her…
The books resting above their movie counterparts mocked him. Twilight, Eragon, The Lord of the Rings…Look at us. She wouldn't have been so solely focused on her career, they jeered. She wouldn't have let us slip by. She would have known. She was good and right and sane, you were the one who screwed things up, only you could maim what she had made, only you, only you, only you….
He choke on a breath that wasn't as deep as it should have been. Rationally, he knew he wasn't responsible for this. Schizophrenia was part of her family tree, not his. There were things that made the social services flinch when they'd applied for adoption, there was insanity galore up and down his genealogy, but not schizophrenia. Not like her brother. But when had he ever been rational?
The zebra-printed comforter felt soft. That was completely, utterly, inconceivably wrong. Her baby was out there on the streets, he'd let her baby get lost on the streets, and the world wouldn't let him feel the pain that was barely contained within his skin. But he breathed, and planed.
The best law enforcement officers in the country would arrive tomorrow, and he'd eat glass and walk over live coals before he'd give up on her baby. If the posters couldn't find her, they'd just have to think of something else. If the police couldn't find her, he'd call the BAU , and even the CIA if he had too. He'd find her girl if it killed him.
It was the least he could do for her.