"All right Jack. After another day watching your 'friend' make a mockery of jury selection, it's either drink until the bottles empty, gorge on comfort food, or commit a homicide. You're call."

McCoy kissed his fiancée on the top of her head as he silently walked towards the refrigerator.

"I swear if I didn't know you and Danielle went so far back, I'd arrange for her to take a fall down those court steps. Nothing bad enough to do permanent damage mind you; just bad enough to get her out of my face and out of the courtroom."

Malinowski's eyes lit up when McCoy opened the box containing 5/6's of a chocolate torte.

"No wonder I love you," she said as gave him a peck on the cheek before turning to retrieve plates and forks."You always know exactly what I need."

"Actually, you can thank Danielle. This is part of the peacemaking ritual," he said handing her a plate."Sure you still want it?'

"I'll find a way to choke it down," she said with a grin as they moved towards the bistro table."Besides, it's a gift to you and you're sharing it with me. Since possession is 9/10's of the law …"

"Well there's more where that came from ... and I don't mean more torte," McCoy said with surprising seriousness.

Malinowski savored the chocolate ecstasy that filled her mouth, as she waited for McCoy to continue. When he remained silent while he toyed with the dessert on his plate, his fiancée reached across the table and took the fork out of his hand.

"It's about the case isn't it? You don't have to put yourself between myself and Danielle. Jack, we are grown up's, even if neither of us have been acting like it lately."

"I wouldn't. If it was just about the case, I wouldn't involve myself and Danielle knows it. This marriage we're about to start wouldn't last long if we started second guessing each, especially if we started second guessing each other professionally."

"Well, unless you've done a 180, you all ready have," she said candidly. "I told you at the start, this was a man mne case and you backed up my boss, remember? You exact words were 'that's why I'm a DA not an ADA', when I told you Jackowski wouldn't let me plead it out the way it should be done."

McCoy remembered the conversation as if it had happened yesterday. He knew how impatient he had sounded. How downright arrogant he'd been. He'd seen enough cases like the Crawford case to know a premeditated murder when he saw one. Just based on the newspaper accounts, he knew Roberta Crawford had put way too much planning into the murder of her allegedly abusive husband, to be able to claim battered wife syndrome made her do it.

McCoy knew what his own mother had suffered for years at the hands of his father. She never once had tried to kill him. Not even after more hospitals visits than she could count. Not even after seeing her children one by one, systematically meet the same fate for not living up to the expectations of Officer John McCoy, that she had. Whether the offense was not making the corned beef tender enough or not tying a shoe fast enough, it hardly mattered. The brutal penalty was still the same.

McCoy told Malinowski, he could understand the need to break the cycle. The need for a woman to run; to take her children to a shelter, to press charges, to go to a family member. God, how he wished there had been more support for women like his mother when he was growing up. But unless the victim had been in the act or the defendant had beaten or abused within a reasonable time frame, McCoy knew the defense could too easily be copied for less than stellar reasons.

"Jack, I'm not hearing anything I didn't already know," Malinowski said as she tried to gently prod him. "I knew you were skeptical of Melnick's defense for Roberta Crawford. You've got to give me a little more to go on here."

"Where was Crawford's son at the time of the murder," McCoy asked carefully avoiding her quizzical gaze.

"The son? Supposedly, he was hiding out in the park. Roberta says he would go there whenever it looked like there was going to be trouble between the spouses."

McCoy nodded. He remembered the drill. At the sound of the first loud noise...his mother's scream, the sound of shattered glass, the slamming of the front door.. he knew it was time to grab his younger sibling and hurry them off to a 'safe' place...

Except for that night. The night McCoy had come home after basketball practice to find his mother unconscious. The night his father had carelessly left his service revolver in plain view, after passing out, after one too many beers.

The night Jack McCoy had decided enough was enough and fired a gun for the first and last time in his life.