He had been a sophomore in high school when it happened. It was a Friday night. His younger sister had all ready left for a sleep over at her best friend's house and his younger brother was on a weekend camping trip with the church youth group.

Knowing it was more than likely he would be alone with his father; McCoy was in no hurry to return home. With his brother and sister safely out of the house and his mother usually at women's fellowship until nine on Friday's, he took the long way back from the park to avoid the house little longer.

As he made his way through the park towards Damen Avenue, he could hear the distant sound of one of the local blues bands. When he was small, his parents used to make a habit of coming down to the park for the free Friday night concerts. Those had been happy times. Although his father always been what his friends in the mental health professions would later call manic/depressive years later, the senor McCoy's good days far outnumbered the bad, back then. Alcoholism had not yet taken control of his father completely.

His mother's Achilles heel had been John McCoy, as soon as she laid eyes on the charming Irishman at a church social, just before her eighteenth birthday. By all accounts, it was love at first sight for the very young, very beautiful, very much sheltered future Mrs. John McCoy .

By the time JackMcCoy was in middle school, the concerts in the park were a thing of the past and his mother's physical beauty was but a memory due to the punishment her body took more and more frequently as John McCoy fell more and more into the bottle.

As he approached the porch of the well worn brownstone, he realized the house was surprisingly dark and quiet. Too quiet. It was nearly nine and McCoy knew the long awaited playoff game between the Bears and the Jets was in full swing. Something his father would never intend to miss.

McCoy would never really know how it happened. All he knew was his father he had passed out near the top of the basement stairs and his mother was at the bottom of those same stairs, unconsious. Sadly, it wasn't the first time he'd come home to such a scene.

After carefully setting his backpack beside his bedroom door, he gave his father a wary kick. A kick instead of a shake, in case the old man was more alert than he looked. A kick put a little more distance between them; giving the teenager a little more time to make a dash back out the front door, if need be.

When his father did nothing but groan and rollover, McCoy started quietly past the open door and down the well worn stairs to the basement. Before going through the usual steps to revive and reassure his mother, McCoy stared down at the woman that lay peacefully in front of him.

He cursed his father for coming home to watch the game, instead of staying down at Flannery's with his partner and friends from the precinct. He cursed his mother for being foolish enough to stay in the house with his father alone, instead of waiting outside for her son's return. If she'd waited for him and the old man started in on her, McCoy thought he might have been able to divert his father's attention long enough for them both to make to the basement, instead of…

Resigned to the situation, he bent down and tried to bring his mother around. He called her name and carefully shook her, to no avail. He paused long enough to grab the smelling salt from behind the laundry supplies.

Growing more alarmed when the smelling salts failed to revive her, he checked unsuccessfully for a pulse.

"Brooke I swear, I thought he'd killed her this time," McCoy in a voice that was barely above whisper.

"He didn't though, did he?"

McCoy shook his head as he stood up and began to pace between the sofa and the dining table. Malinowski desperately wanted to find away to take the unbearable memory from her lover's consciousness. She inwardly cursed Danielle Melnick for bringing such a traumatic event back to the front of McCoy's mind.

No case…no defendant...was worth making McCoy relive any part of his life in Chicago.

"The emergency room doctors were able to bring her around," he said as he settled beside the window."But not before I realized what would happen to us. If he had killed her, that meant we'd be alone with him. Now, I was almost fifteen...I knew I'd made that far... I could make it the three years I needed to turn eighteen and either get a job or enlist. Either option would have given me the satisfaction of spiting at him and his obsession with me going to law school," McCoy said, his tone uncharacteristically hard and bitter.

"But your siblings… you'd never leave them," she responded."How old were they?"

"Colleen was twelve and Patrick was nine. They'd have never made it alone with him. Anything was better than that…going to Grandma McCoy…even living with strangers would have been better…"

Malinowski shivered as she felt a sudden chill run up her spine. His ominous tone sent a rush of visions through her mind, none of which that were pleasant.

"Jack, what exactly are you saying? What did you do?"

"I went back up stairs," he said more to himself than to her. "I went back up upstairs. I stepped over my father and almost tripped over it."

"It?'

McCoy could still remember the dull ache in his big toe when he nearly fell over his father's service revolver. That's when he knew how bad the battle must have been before he came home. It was a ritual that he couldn't remember his father missing: Removing his holster and placing the Smith and Wesson Police Special in the top drawer of the night table on his father's side of the bed.

Without thinking, he bent down and suddenly the gun was in his hands. His first thought was to turn the barrel towards himself, but almost immediately he discarded the idea. He knew it would only be worse for his siblings if he were to leave them, as well as having them lose their mother.

To leave them alone with him was unthinkable.

The gun felt heavy in his hand. McCoy gripped the weapon as he'd seen his father grip it when he had gone with him to the police firing range... automatically releasing the safety. Maybe this was a chance … a chance for his siblings to find another family… a family that was a real family…where yelling and drinking and hitting and things as well as people, being broken weren't the order of the day….

"Jack," Malinowski whispered, as she gently rested her hand against the face that had gone ashen and chilly.

She knew the outcome couldn't have been what it was begining to sound like. She remembered her lover remarking once about returning to his hometown for his father's funeral with his assistant / lover at the time, the late Diana Hawthorne. But his tone, the far away look in his dark eyes, his whole manner had her more than a little worried.

"My brother and sister would have been better off without him...hell... the world would have been better off without my father."

"Jack, you didn't kill him."

McCoy finally swung around from the window.

"No I didn't, but I wanted to Brooke," he said looking unapologetically in her eyes. "I wanted to more than I've wanted anything before or since and I would have too, if my mother hadn't left her sweater in Aunt Siobhan's car after fellowship."

McCoy remembered staring down at his father and thinking about how easy it would be to put an end to the fear, the uncertainty, and the constant pain – both physical and emotional the older McCoy inflicted.. He knew Father Christopher would tell him he would suffer eternal damnation for taking a life, but McCoy already suffered in an unimaginable hell and with his mother dead….the Bible said thou shalt not kill…it also said an eye for an eye…

The sound of the front door slamming made young McCoy jump, his fingers slipping and the sound of the gun expelling a cartridge, as well as the sudden recoil of the gun as it was fired, sent McCoy stumbling until his back was against the wall across from the stairs.

Malinowski took the half empty glass of scotch from his hand and set down on the counter. Wrapping her arms around him, she rocked him gently as a hand smoothly stroked the hair at the base of his neck. After what seemed like hours, McCoy loosened his grip on her shoulders and led her to the sofa.

"Listen to me," she said taking his face in her hands. "You were in shock. You didn't know what you were doing. You thought your father killed your mother. You know, if either one of us heard that story from a defendant, we'd drop any criminal charges..."

"What about the Crawford boy," McCoy asked hoarsely. "Danielle would never have gone to such lengths..."

While her head told her the unburdening of such a terrible weight was a good thing, Malinowski's heart ached for McCoy. The more she learned about her fiancée's past, the more she realized what a remarkable man Jack McCoy was. The fact he had so successfully moved beyond his past, only to have it smack him right between the eyes due to Danielle Melinick's well intentioned meddling, was a fact she had no intention of overlooking.

"Don't worry about Danielle and her client," Malinowski responded firmly. "I'll see that the appropriate steps are taken, later. Right now, I'm more concerned with making things right for you."

"Brooke, this is something that can never be made right," he said warily."It's a side of me I'm not proud of, but it's there. It's part of who I am. A very ugly part, just like the part of me that broke that vase."

Malinowski rested her head on his shoulder as she tried to think of a way to change the path he seemed to be heading towards. She was aware the subtle changes in herself since accepting McCoy's proposal. Scenes like the vase incident would not have been tolerated before the engagement. Deep down, she knew she'd been testing the waters, seeing how strong their bond was and what it might with stand. She also sensed McCoy either consciously or subconsciously had been doing the same the night, the vase had been broken.

With or without Melnick's prodding, Malinowski knew McCoy had taken a huge leap of faith sharing such a traumatizing story. She wasn't about to leave the door open for McCoy to use it as a bridge to self doubt or uncertainty.

"I think you need a road trip," she said as she began to thoughtfully finger the open collar of his shirt.

"As much as I'd enjoy a ride down the coast, "McCoy began with an uncertain smile on his lips, "don't see how as bike ride down..."

"Not down the coast, up. Up to Maine," Malinowski countered knowingly. "How long has it been since you've seen your daughter, Jack?"