2011: It's been ten years since the sky literally came crashing down around Yael Malkah and upended her world. Now she's returned to New York to visit her ailing grandmother. With no other family, it's up to her to take care of the family business...
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A sledgehammer banged and slammed about in Haustin's head, leaving him with a bitch of a headache. His eyes were gritty as if coated in sand, and a black, stormy cloud nipped at his heels. After his damn crying jag, which he was trying very hard to forget, he'd driven through the city in a daze. Not the best idea, but what part of anything he'd done in the last twenty-four hours had been bright?
As night fell, the urge to make things right with Yael, or try to, took root. She deserved an explanation. Only, he didn't know what reason to give her. The idea of standing in front of her and showing her his vulnerability terrified him to the very core. He wanted to be the strong one and be there for her, not the other way around.
Unconsciously, he found himself parked across the street from Ground Zero.
The Freedom Tower was well on its way into the skyline. The weird glass structure, which would house the memorial museum, reflected the lights of the city. Even the footprints of the twin towers, hollowed into the ground, were unrecognizable. The city was turning them into a fountain with the names of the victims etched into the walls. Ridiculous. As if anyone in this country needed a reminder.
So many times, Haustin had wound up here, sitting and staring, but once they finished with the recovery, he had never gone inside or set foot off the nearest sidewalk. He wondered how it would feel to stand in the place where he'd seen the first body fall or where he exited the tower before the collapse, the places they dug four stories down in an attempt to find someone—anyone.
If Haustin tilted his head and peered at the space in a particular light, he saw smoke billowing up from the pile's sun streaming through the leftover pieces of the towers' steel façade, the giant American flag billowing on the side of the Brooks Brothers building.
He remembered the pain in his back and the sweat on his tongue, dirt in his teeth as they dug, day after day, bucket after bucket. Fires burned for weeks, deep inside, where the water didn't reach. The chemicals in the air burned his skin, his lungs, but he hadn't worried about toxins; there wasn't time. Then, there were the haunting silences that fell whenever a body was found, or often only a piece of a body—thousands of them. Feet still inside shoes. Limbs. Torsos. A finger boasting an unblemished diamond ring.
They treated each corpse as if it was special cargo, placed on a stretcher and draped in an American flag. When only a piece was found, someone had the idea to arrange debris around it, so the shape under the flag at least resembled a body. Those watching shouldn't have to witness how little they actually recovered.
Haustin climbed from his truck, body stiff and drained, feeling older than his years, and walked the block to Liberty Street, to the firehouse for Engine and Ladder 10, or Ten House as it was known throughout the department.
The small brick building that sat across from the Trade Center had become a sort of Mecca for firefighters. Initially buried under forty feet of debris, the shell was eventually turned into a staging area, a place for recovery workers to rest after a long day. It had taken a little over two years to be rebuilt and reopened, but it turned into much more than a simple firehouse.
