Sure enough, Angela had finally found that she could do nothing more for her dad but wait, and did so, with a promise from Jack that he'd call to check on everything later. She had cleaned the blood from the closet the best she could, and set everything the way it was, except for the picture of her mom holding her. Since she had found her dad, she didn't really need the computer anymore, so she turned it back off.

Finally, she had been sitting in the living room, watching TV, when she heard movement in the other room.

He was tall, and very handsome. She saw his eyes were hers, and so was his nose. Her other features belonged to her birth (but by no means, any other sort of one to her) mother.

"Dad?" Something in Jack's voice made her want to call him 'Jack', not 'Grandpa' or something, because he didn't sound like a grandpa. He sounded like simply, Jack.

But Chase didn't look like he would mind being called dad after he got used to it. She just sensed that.

Angela took small steps through the doorway and stopped. She had heaved him up on the bed, and saw that he was sitting up, looking confused. His expression matched the feeling of waking up and not quite remembering exactly how you got there, like when you went on a trip or something.

"Huh?"

"I'm…Angela. Your daughter,"

There was a silence with so much awkwardness and confusion from both, that there was an impression there that they had too many questions to ask at once. And so the father's hazel eyes looked into his daughter's with a feeling one couldn't quite name, and said with a blow of utter bewilderment.

"Angela?"

"Yeah," (It was a rather good word. "Kudos to Jack," she thought.)

"What…why…how…?" He was so confused when he had just woken up. Not like his long lost daughter was helping any.

"I ran away from home. I couldn't take not knowing you or Jack anymore. You're my dad," She breathed the last sentence with such emotion that one would have looked up to make sure that she wasn't crying. "And mom says that you don't care. But how am I supposed to know if it's true or not? I had to find out for myself,"

He was silent. He plopped his head back on the pillow.

She gave him a little bit for his mind to catch up with the time.

"How did you end up unconscious in a closet?" she asked him conversationally, almost sarcastically, but her attentive eyes stopped the sarcasm in its tracks.

He stared at her for a minute and shook his head, with the slight ghost of a smile that plainly told her that she was just like her dad. "I came home from work at CTU, that's-"

She cut him off coolly, "I'm aware of what CTU is. I've only spent the last two and a half years of my life trying to be like you and find out everything about that place and become a sort of agent myself."

He sat there with his mouth slightly open, taken aback by how simply upfront she was being. "Uh, yeah, that's great!" He congratulated. "…As I was saying, I come home from work and some psycho is in my apartment. I fought him, but being off duty, I didn't have any weapons, so it was all hand to hand until he brought out a pocketknife. And then…he got me vulnerable enough to put a cloth over my mouth and nose and it was over,"

Angela nodded. "I was chased around the building from the bathroom by two men, both of which I knocked out long enough to get away. I thought…" she took a deep breath and continued. "I thought that he was you. My dad, I mean…he sorta cornered me…"

Chase nodded in understanding.

"I don't really understand why they were trying to capture me. What did I do?" she questioned in that casual-but-not-so sort of way.

"No idea," he shrugged carelessly.

"So, let me get this straight: I'm supposed to believe that you have no idea why these guys were chasing me around AND taking control of your apartment AND knocking you out? There's got to be something they were after," Angela thought out loud.

"Well, I have a bunch of CTU data on the laptop. They were probably after that." He said with a wave of his hand.

Angela nodded knowingly. He was a bad liar, or at least he was to someone who didn't know him. She'd try a different approach…

"Mom misses you. She says she's let go, but she hasn't. Truthfully, I haven't seen her as happy as she was in that-" she motioned to the picture on the nightstand. "-Ever."

She watched his eyes for the signs. They flickered over to the picture, with such a desperate look that she had trouble going on. Her insides were doing a happy dance. He still cared. He still wanted to care. He still loved. She fought back the smile that wanted to roll onto her lips.

"What do you have to say for leaving? You broke her heart. By doing so, you not only pushed her away, but me, too. You're my dad! I've never known you. But apparently CTU is more important than me. And mom."

Oh, yes, he was softening up. She would get the truth. He knew why those guys wanted to capture her, and she was going to find out, even if it meant the dramatic tear fest.

But Chase said nothing. And so Angela began to cry passionately, "So why is that, huh, dad? Why have you never bothered to stop in? Do you really not love me, do you really not care?"

So she was going against what she believed in, but after two fake tears slid down her cheeks as though they were mere hills of snow, it paid off.

"Angela," he said softly. "I never wanted it to be like this,"

And so he told her the story, her mouth and eyes widening the deeper he went into it. After forty-five minutes or so, he was finished, and she said in an unusually forceful voice, "You're telling mom. You're telling her all of this." Chase opened his mouth to retort, but she cut him off, "And neither of us will take no for an answer,"

Jack called right on time at that point and she picked up the phone.

"Yeah, Angela, can I talk to your dad?"

"Sure," she uncertainly made to give her phone to her dad, but stopped midway, and told Jack, "There's more to it than you know," and handed the phone over.

They talked for a minute, Chase's eyes looking sometimes desperate of retort, others on the verge of a laugh, and then sometimes quite terrified. She wondered briefly what sort of threats Jack must be throwing at him.

Finally, he handed the phone back to her, and Jack said, "Angela?"

"Yeah?"

"I'm coming with you when Chase talks to Kim,"

"Okay," was all she needed to say, and then they hung up.

By then it was nighttime, and much too late to drive all the way to Visalia, and it would be much later still to tell all of this to her mom, so he helped her bring out the couch-bed and then said, "Goodnight, Angela," and she replied, "'Night Dad,"

And they both had happier dreams than they'd had in a long, long time.