“I don’t know who I became this summer,” I admitted. “But I know I’m not him.”
He clapped a hand on my shoulder.
“Good,” he said. “Let’s build someone better.”
And standing there, surrounded by broken wood and open land, I realized something simple and true:
Love had nearly destroyed me.
But work—real work—might save me.
All the way back to Boston, that air stayed with me.
The smell of pine.
The quiet.
The way the wind sounded through the leaves.
Because ever since September, I hadn’t been right.
I hadn’t told anyone that.
Not Tony.
Not my mother.
Not Beth.
But the truth was, I hadn’t slept more than three hours a night since the towers fell.
I’d been there.
Close enough to smell it.
Close enough to hear it.
The way the air turned thick and gray and wrong.
The way ash blocked out the sun.
The way sirens never stopped.
The way we tried to help and mostly just… moved bodies.
Buried what we couldn’t save.
Every night, it came back.
The sound of impact.
The smell of smoke and metal and something I still couldn’t name.
The feeling that no matter how hard I worked, I couldn’t fix what mattered.
Driving south, watching the leaves blur past, it hit me like a light turning on.
This wasn’t just about Sage.
