I almost didn’t answer the phone on the morning of the eleventh, because I was running for the shower, and one of my college friends usually called me up in the morning to see what I was doing. It was my boyfriend, the now-husband, and he told me to turn on the TV.

I wasn’t surprised. I didn’t understand the people who said afterward that no one could ever have imagined it. I’d assumed something like this was coming. I had assumed it would be biological, because that’s what all the magazines had talked about.

I remember that we talked about who might be behind it. He said they were saying Bin Laden, and I said that was what they had said after Oklahoma City. He reminded me that Bin Laden had hit the WTC before, and I cursed.

I couldn’t decide if I was supposed to go in to work, but I remembered talking to a friend’s mother in London, who described going to work every morning during the Blitz, after trying to sleep in the shelters, so I said to hell with it, and got on the bus.

We were down around Laurel Village when the woman listening to her radio on headphones looked up and said “The second tower is down. They just announced it.”

All that week, all that month, in downtown San Francisco, people looked up. No one ever looks up like that.

I worked in insurance at the time, and we did business with a lot of companies who had offices in the towers. Our brokers had lost old friends and coworkers. There was a truck bomb threat at the Embarcadero center next door. The boss pulled everyone together and said that if we were afraid to be in the office, to go home.

I was about to move in with my boyfriend, once his parents had cleared out of their house to move back to Hawaii. We didn’t know if their flight would be cleared. I said something about this to the snippy Russian kid we’d just hired, and she said “Who would want to attack Hawaii?” I said “Yamamoto,” and laughed hysterically. She didn’t get it. Then she told me about how soft Americans were, and that in Europe ‘everyone lives with this’, and I went to lunch.

Two weeks later, I got back a letter I’d sent out to WTC 2. It was marked ‘Return to Sender, Address Unknown’. I had to make the strangest business call of my life—“Is the person I sent this to alive? If so, where should I send it? If not, my condolences, I’m so sorry, where should I send the letter?”

She was alive.