A/N: Disclaimer: all rights for original characters belong to ITV, however much I might want Alec Hardy to save him from being broken.

I wrote this as background for what we now know about the Sandbrook case and his personal life.

"Dad?"

Alec started, cuffing his eyes with his sleeve and looking over his shoulder at his daughter who had come up silently behind him. "Yeah, sweetheart, what is it?" he said, taking a gulping breath and forcing control into his voice.

"Are you okay?"

He thought for a second about lying; but she wasn't stupid, and at the very least deserved emotional honesty from him, like he had always sworn he'd give her. He shook his head and held out his hand for her to come to him.

"Daddy, what is it?"

She hadn't called him 'Daddy' in a long time, ever since it had somehow become a name only little kids used, and it threatened to bring tears to his eyes again. He swallowed hard and blinked them back as she sat down beside him.

"Dad?" she asked asked again, worry now spreading itself across her features.

He took another deep breath and blew it out, steeling himself for the lie that hewas about to tell her. "Something happened at work today," he said, pain threatening to rip him to shreds.

"A bad case?" she asked.

He never spoke much about his work when he was home; it was a world his daughter did not need to know about. But ever since she was really little she'd always had a knack of knowing when to crawl into his lap if something had been particularly rough. "No," he said, "Something that happened on one I'm already on." He paused and squeezed his eyes closed for a brief second. His heart hammered. How the hell was he going to tell her..? He raised his head and looked straight into her eyes which were searching his.

"I…listen, sweetheart," he reached over and took one of her hands in his, "There's going to be…a lot of things…coming out in the news…about me." He could see reservation creep into her face. If he had thought it was bad when he'd found out exactly what his wife had been doing going to that hotel, knowingly, single-handedly possibly irrevocably wrecking the relationship he had with his daughter, collapsed a black hole in his chest that didn't even compare to the gut punch that the former discovery had been. "It's not all going to be true," he said, "But I did…make a mistake. And I wanted you to hear it from me before you hear anything at school like, 'Isn't that your dad?', or see it on the news, and to know that whatever happens or what anybody says happened, that I love you. I love you so much."

He could see her start to distance herself emotionally from him, the caring concern turn into wary suspicion. He couldn't do this… he couldn't do this… He raged against the impossibility of the situation he'd been put in, raged against the utter unfairness of the cards that had been thrown at his feet… that he had to be the one to destroy the thing in the world that was most precious to him. Intellectual hope told him that their relationship wouldn't be gone, but he wasn't naïve. The shadow of doubt alone would be enough to change things, and that was all that mattered.

He had tried to rehearse over and over in his mind how and what he would tell her, but nothing had ever sounded right , and even now he barely make sense of the contradicting blankness and information overload that spun in his brain. He started to speak and prayed to god he would survive this. Though how, he had no idea.

"The murder of those girls at Sandbrook?" he started.

His daughter nodded.

He took a deep breath, "The case is going to fall through and they're going to say it's my fault."

She stilled. This wasn't him. He might not say a whole lot about his job, but she was very well aware and very proud of his success as a detective. "Is it?" she asked.

He glanced down before looking back up at her. "Technically? No. To all intents and purposes? Yes."

"What does that mean?" she asked warily.

His voice was even and quiet. Something inside him had gone numb – an acceptance of his fate and what he had to do. "It means…" he blew out a breath, "That no one is going to care about the technical rules of police procedure."

"But that's not fair!" she exploded, "If it's not really your fault…"

"I lost evidence," he interrupted her.

He watched as her indignation on his behalf, froze.

"My car got broken into," his chest twisted painfully as he told the lie and spoke the next part of his sentence, "And they're going to say it was while I was…" his heart hammered at the raw and remembered pain of the moment he had seen them kiss at the hotel bar. The last words came out in rush, otherwise he wouldn't be able to say them, "…cheating on your mother."

She stared at him like she didn't know him and slowly slid her hand out of his.

There was nothing to describe the desperate and agonizing helplessness he felt as he watched the consecutive destruction in one day of everything that mattered to him.

"Were you?" she whispered.

He looked up and away, trying to control the tears that had once again filled his eyes, nothing but the images of his wife kissing another man, her hand caressing his neck and waist, circled viciously in his head.

"You were, weren't you!" his daughter said in disgusted horror, mistaking his momentary silence for affirmation.

He hastily shook his head and looked at her. "No. No I wasn't. You have to believe me," he practically begged, "I would, and could, never to that to your mother."

She nodded; but he could see that she wasn't entirely sure whether to believe him, and he didn't think his heart could have shattered any more completely. Because he knew that spark of doubt was all it would take with the pressures and situation that would soon be descending on them. It would forever exist, either big or small, and he knew she'd never really look at him the same, no matter if she gave verbal lip service to his innocence.

Her phone rang, and she took the excuse of one of her friends calling to head back into the house without saying anything more to him about the subject.

He watched her close the slider door and disappear. He leaned his elbows on his knees and pressed his eyes into the heels of his hands. It's for the best…it's for the best…it's for the best… he told himself. But the intellectual conviction did nothing to ease the pain of what had been done to him and what he was doing, and for the first time since that morning (he found it impossible to believe his life had changed so completely in only nine hours), he finally gave in to full extent of his emotions and cried with a grief he hadn't thought could exist.