Please note: this chapter is long and dark in places

Sunday 13th June

2007 Ford Mustang GT Convertible (Manual Shift/Torch Red)

The newer model Mustangs didn't have the same classic and "dangerous" look to them as the ones he grew up with but Goren wasn't about to complain. The V8 under the hood throbbed just nicely, it was made to be driven manual shift and anyone who said rear wheel drive had its day was an idiot. Nor as he headed south through Manhattan, would he necessarily want to be without some of the modern gadgetry on most cars.

Unlike the older Ponies, including those with hard tops, this one didn't have built in drafts unless you put the roof down. A temptation he'd resisted given the urgency of the situation, his rush to leave Caro's apartment and the time it took to adjust everything else on the car. So his knees were not up round his ears, the steering wheel not embedded in his crotch and him only able to see the Mustang's own sleek lines in the mirrors.

It did cross Goren's mind when he stopped at some lights to flick the switch to fold the roof back, since it was already a warm morning. But then he saw a bunch of Lycra clad female joggers heading his way. It would have looked far too much like a lecherous middle-aged man trying to impress young hotties with his boy toy.

Especially so in that colour Caro admitted herself, was a cliché. When he first saw the car, she told him she believed every woman should have at least one bright red convertible before she reached forty or settled down. She'd yet to do the latter and concluded four years off the big "four o" she might as well make maximum use of the time left. It was an interesting philosophy he was inclined to agree with, though by then he was itching to indulge his own petrol head tendencies and persuade her to let him drive it.

Contrary to the word he'd used on Friday and what Eames had said earlier, Dr Caroline Reese was not a "shrink". That term was usually restricted to psychiatrists who first qualified as medical doctors. She was a clinical psychologist, her doctorate was one of philosophy and her substantive post was at Massachusetts General in Boston. Nor had their relationship ever been a professional one with him as a "client". If so, she would have been in major breach of ethics even before they began sharing a bed.

Nor and, despite what some people perhaps assumed, was what was between them ever any form of informal "therapy" for him. Unless you counted the therapeutic effects of spending time with someone who was interesting, funny, not another cop and had the added bonus for a straight guy. Of being a good-looking woman who pressed all his buttons below his belly one. As Caro once said herself, there was a clear line between people she dealt with professionally and interacted with socially. For reasons of her own self-preservation, never mind the fact she had a Mustang to keep on the road and didn't work for free.

Goren also knew if anyone would have been able to detect her going into "therapy" mode it would be him. He'd had, like it or not, many years of informal education in the field and experience of that profession dealing with his Mom. He'd known Caroline Reese maybe six hours, seen her three times before he ever realised he'd drawn a wrong conclusion about her occupation the first time they met. An occasion when he was not exactly at his best.

In "The Divine Comedy" Dante had claimed that the inferno of hell had nine circles of increasing misery for the occupants, culminating in the frozen lake of Cocytus. Goren was never sure in the months after his mother died exactly which circle of his own personal hell he reached, though the ninth he'd notionally thought of as "Surrender". The point where he wouldn't even realise he'd given up trying. Not until he found himself out of job or getting treated for an overdose of something in an ER and possibly both.

Whether he hit circle five, six or seven didn't really matter. What did, was that he'd gone from using alcohol in moderation and for relaxation to consciously self-medicating with it. Never reached the point of secretly drinking on the job but he would have failed a blood alcohol test many mornings when he got to work. Eames and others like Logan and Wheeler certainly realised that and sometimes had to run interference for him with Ross until he was over the worst of the early fog.

On top of that there was medication for depression his physician prescribed when he finally yielded to the pressure to go see him. Except he was increasingly abusing that as well. Doubling up the dosage, especially at night to try to help him sleep. Deceiving his doctor and making the supply last as long it should, by supplementing it with pills from the street. You didn't work Narco as long as he did or have a schizophrenic mother without developing both considerable knowledge of pharmaceuticals and where to get them illicitly. Nor was it just "uppers" and "downers" he was using and it was sheer dumb luck he never got caught up in a random test.

Little wonder people feared Bobby Goren was on the edge of a total "breakdown" when a lot of what he was doing "to cure" the situation was inexorably becoming part of "the problem". And like most people in that situation Goren himself knew it. Knew he was being protected from himself at times by his partner who was risking her own career to do it. Saw the huddles of colleagues round the water cooler who looked suddenly awkward when they saw him coming. Knew there was a limit to their patience with him and that of the friends he'd been systematically pushing away and were no doubt making worried calls between them. He knew it; he hated himself for it and thus the circle went on as he sought escape from self-loathing by putting more mood altering substances down his throat or into his lungs and several times up his nose.

It wasn't who he was. All his adult life he'd been determined not to be his reckless and dissolute father or his older brother Frank, who for all his weaknesses and failures always seemed to be preferred for reasons he never understood. He could break the mould of genes, rearing and example and had seemed to be succeeding. Then one thing after the other began to go wrong, to eat away at the professional and personal life he'd built for himself and with it, eroding the self belief that had been essential to survive much of his early life.

Then one day Robert Goren simply didn't know who "he" was or "what" he was anymore. His mother's dying bombshell about his possible paternity didn't bring that about. It just brought into focus very sharply something that had been quietly happening for longer than he probably realised. Bobby Goren thought he was a house built on rock. But it turned out to be sand after all and what Mom said was just the final wave to wash away an already crumbling foundation.

There was no sudden conversion on the road, no single event that prompted the change, no chord struck by anyone who cared for him that stopped the downward spiral. He just woke up one morning feeling like shit, which wasn't exactly novel and looked about him. The usually pristine apartment had become one you couldn't rent to pigs with a sense of smell. His mother's possessions brought back from Carmel Ridge still sitting in boxes gathering dust and a cross between a distillery and a drug store, in a kitchen that the health department would condemn.

The contents of the bottles and any substance didn't have a proper pharmacy label went down the john while coffee brewed. By afternoon the place was clean though he'd lost will and energy to deal with his mother's effects. But the evening was liable to be a dangerous time. Time to fill and one where his regular aimless and nocturnal wanderings would too easily take him by too many bars could prove too hard to resist.

Amid the midden when he was clearing up, he'd found a programme of extra mural lectures at Colombia. So he took himself off to the Art Faculty, where a professor and the topic of Caravaggio kept held his attention for just over an hour. He'd noticed the brunette across and a row down because of the bright yellow sweater. And from a question she asked and seeing her talking to the speaker as a mix of people filed out, he assumed she was a fellow faculty member. He'd browsed some other notices and gone for a coffee in the cafeteria to kill time. Then, leaving the rest room, not paying attention, thinking about Jack Daniels and struggling with his topcoat, he'd walked right into the woman in the yellow sweater.

Her take away latte landed mostly on him and he made almost as much mess of the apology and trying to gather the contents of a file he'd knocked out of her hand. Forty minutes later he'd dried out, she'd drunk the replacement sitting with him in the cafeteria, they'd exchanged first names, discussed the lecture and shared the fact they had both seen the painter's "The Beheading of St. John the Baptist" at the cathedral named for him in Malta. Though not how they each came to be on the tiny Mediterranean Island where Caravaggio completed some of his most important work and which led him to be considered as the master of Chiaroscuro.

"See you next week maybe" was just something you said automatically, but during the very tough seven days he had sober and only taking his prescription meds it was a target for Goren to aim for. That he wouldn't go back to the bottle or street drugs until then and get himself to Colombia. Not easy when no longer numb and insensitive you begin to realise fully the extent of what you've done to yourself and to those around you. To realise how much your partner had been carrying and covering up for you. The sort of reality that you did want to escape and evade with artificial help to avoid the pain.

But he did it somehow, got to Columbia and took up Caroline's gesture to sit with her and a friend. But at the end it was only the two of them went for coffee. All he really told her was he was a cop and anything they learned about each other was more in passing than the result of questions either of them asked directly. He gathered she was at the University working on a research project with a former classmate from Harvard and that her permanent home was Boston. The only thing he did clumsily explore was whether he was keeping her from a vague "something or someone" when he realised how the time had flown discussing art and movies. He wasn't in any state or shape to be looking for a relationship and at that time considered himself to be a very bad bet for any woman, with all he was working through.

So no one was more surprised than Goren as they headed towards separate ways. When he found himself suddenly saying perhaps…sometime…if she wanted…they could do something? A gallery or one of a season of Mexican movies he saw in the paper…showing at City College? Not sure when he found himself alone on the sidewalk, if he'd hallucinated the part where Caroline said she'd not yet seen the special Renaissance Religious Art exhibit at the Met and they could meet there on Saturday. Obviously not, since he was there at the appointed time and so was Caroline. And it was only during cake and coffee afterwards that he discovered she wasn't what he thought she was. When she said she'd not be at the lecture next week because she had to return to Boston for a hospital board meeting.

The rest as they say was history. They began to see each other maybe once a week. Not really "dating" and not him pouring out his problems looking for free professional help. He deliberately evaded and avoided those things. Just grateful Caro let him do that when odd words slipped out, as inevitably they did over time. Just friends and it was two months before he discovered she'd switched plans to go with other people to meet him at the Met that weekend. But then walking in Central Park, not sure it was the smart thing to do and as anxious as a thirteen year old, he'd just reached for her hand. Not had his own rejected and been told she should probably confess something to him now.

By then he was starting to reduce the prescription tranquillizers and accepting it would be a while before Ross and Eames eased their not always very subtle surveillance and monitoring of what he was doing, how he looked and the odd quizzical glances when he said something slightly off the wall. As Alex said the other day, she was "getting there" in terms of her particular demons and he was doing the same. Whether things would ever be quite the same Goren had no idea. He was still finding out all over "who" he was, but not being sure wasn't scary any more and something else had come back into his life.

Whatever "happy" was these days for him and was going to be in the future, at least he felt that emotion again. And not just when he and Caroline were in bed, again something happened in stages and gradually. Maybe not the norm for adults in an age when you went from first base to the grand slam homer in the blink of an eye. He'd had his fair share of those experiences down the years as well and might have had more, for all the good it would have done him.

If he'd had a hot Mustang to impress the girls when he was younger for example. Would have had a part share in one too, had bloody Lewis not traded the one they were re-building for a death trap, VW camper van. Without asking him first and trying to convince him by the time next summer came, they'd have it in a fit state to make it all the way to the West Coast. With the added convenience of a bed on wheels for them and all the girls they'd lure into it along the way.

To Goren's knowledge Lewis never lured a single one anywhere in the Five Boroughs, forget LA and all points between. Because it barely left the drive of his folks place by the time summer came and he was on his way to basic training. Come to think of it, he never did get all the money he was owed on his end of that bad trade.

Goren turned the Mustang onto West 25th making a mental note to one day extract the last forty-two dollars and fifty cents from his friend and once through the perimeter, weaving the car around the usual collection of official vehicles a crime scene attracted. Searching for a spot to leave it, Goren saw Eames walking along the sidewalk and then greeting a man and woman.

Just as you thought the day couldn't get any worse, it did. When he realised that was Elliot Stabler.

To be continued…