When I Come Home ➺ Spencer Reid

When I Come Home - 11

Spencer shut his case file and picked up his bag again before following his three friends as they walked towards the elevator. The ride to the lobby was awkward, for everyone but Spencer, as they all wanted to start asking questions right away.

Once in the lobby, Spencer walked out and made his way out of the building and to a shawarma restaurant the team often frequents. It was a, slightly uncomfortable, silent walk to the small restaurant. The bell rang overhead as they walked in single file. It took a minute for them to find a place to sit, a far corner near the window which looked out on the pedestrians on to the sidewalk. 

The second they sat down Garcia immediately leaned forward to start her questioning, but was interrupted by the waitress who came over to take their drinks. After getting each person's drink choice situated, the questioning started. 

"Have you known each other long?" Garcia started off the questioning. 

"We met when on April 15th in 1997, Morgan was sixteen and I was seventeen. We met at the Long Beach Boardwalk. She was out with some friends and I went to Long Beach for a seminar and decided, on a whim, to go to the boardwalk."

"How did you guys begin to date?" Morgan asked this question.

"Well we didn't for a while, Morgan wasn't allowed to date at that time. Morgan had very abusive parents, while no they would never hit her, they very much emotionally and verbally abused her. We were friends for a year before Morgan agreed to a date with me. At the time I didn't know that her parents had no idea about us and that she was getting more abuse by being friends with me. Once she graduated she got accepted into Washington State University on a school counseling masters degree. I decided to go with her and we left California. In her second year, we decided we wanted to get married. I was scared it would be too much pressure with her schooling. But we decided to throw caution to the wind and we got married on April 15, 2001, exactly four years after we met. The next year Morgan had been volunteering at an orphanage and fell in love with this year-old named Ryan, and begged me to adopt her. She didn't have to ask too much, I will do most anything Morgan asks of me. So, I went and met the little girl, and lo and behold I  also fell in love with her very quickly. We quickly got the papers, it also helped that Morgan was volunteering at the orphanage." 

"Wait so you adopted?" JJ interrupted.

"For our first, it became official on Valentine's Day of 2002. The day we took our daughter home was the day Morgan's parents showed up for the first time in two years. What was a good day quickly became sour, Morgan's parents are very wealthy and have a lot of pull in California. They spouted off a lot of bullshit about how they could call their lawyers- corrupt lawyers might I add- and get us divorced before we could even blink. They demanded that Morgan was to return Ryan and divorce me so they could keep up their perfect family image. That was the first day Morgan actually stood up for herself, so they left pretty quickly realizing they had no more control over her. But she was paranoid, she knows her parents better than me and she knew they would come back. So we used our second option.

I had known for about a year at that time that I wanted to do good in the world and wanted to go into the academy; our plan was to wait the last year until she graduated and then move to Quantico, but the unexpected visit moved it along quicker. We were moved to Virginia a month later, I was enrolled in the academy and Morgan was accepted into Georgetown. During the day when neither of us were home our neighbors- an older couple- watched Ryan. Our lives stayed like that for about eight more months until Gideon picked me up from academy and Morgan graduated. So I started at the BAU and Morgan picked up a job as a therapist. We stayed in our apartment for another two years before learning Morgan was pregnant. We decided our apartment was too small so we bought a house in Stafford a couple of weeks later. We still live there with all of our kids."