Page 23 of Truly, Madly, Deeply
And he’d never been heard from again.
What could her mother mean? Reagan pinched the bridge of her nose. “Mom… new information?”
“Yes.” She took a deep breath. “I heard from the widow of one of your father’s coworkers. She’s looked for me since the attacks that day.”
Reagan stood and walked to the front door of the hotel. She needed air. “Why? What for?”
“Because…” Her mother hesitated. “This woman’s husband called her before the North Tower collapsed. They stayed on the phone together.”
And then Reagan’s mother told her the story of how her father had spent his final minutes. It was a story they hadn’t known before this, and it made Reagan both sick and beyond proud.
As the story came to an end, Luke and Tommy stepped off the elevator.
“I have to go, Mom.” Reagan didn’t cry. The news her mother had just shared was too profound, too unbelievable. “I’ll call you later.”
The conversation ended and Reagan met up with her husband and son. She didn’t say a word about what she had just learned. She could barely get her mind around it herself. She would tell Luke and Tommy later. For now they needed to connect with Ashley and Landon at the memorial.
Traffic was terrible around Ground Zero so they walked the last few blocks. Today there were twice as many people wandering the parklike area as yesterday. They met up with Ashley and Landon and all five of them headed to the four-sided waterfall, rimmed by a memorial pool.
Ashley and Landon split off to find Jalen’s name on the other memorial wall, and Reagan, Luke and Tommy made their way to where her father’s name was engraved. It didn’t take long to find it and as they did Reagan was overcome by the truth.
They were in the exact spot where the North Tower once stood.
In the very place where her father had been working high above them that Tuesday morning, the three of them huddled and stared at his name in the stone wall.
THOMAS DOUGLAS DECKER.
Reagan’s eyes blurred with tears and she put her hand on the cold letters. All around her people were doing the same thing. Remembering the ones they lost, finding some sort of solace in touching a piece of the wall.
Tommy pulled a slip of paper and a pencil from his backpack. This part had been his idea. A way to take home the memory from today. Reagan watched their son position the paper over her father’s name. Then with quick gentle strokes, Tommy ran the side of his pencil over the paper so that the name came through.
A permanent keepsake.
There was an open bench nearby, and the three of them sat down. The sun shone through the trees here, which Reagan appreciated. She’d been freezing since they reached the reflecting pool. Here on the bench Luke sat on one side of her, Tommy on the other. Reagan stared up where the tower used to stand. A hundred times she had come here to visit her dad. Her mother would bring her when she was little, and as she got older she would stop by on visits from college.
“You came here to see Grandpa, right, Dad?” Tommy’s voice was soft. Appropriate for the moment. “When you and Mom were dating?”
This was something Reagan and Tommy had talked about last night. Tommy knew he was born before his parents married. And he knew they’d been apart for a year after his birth. But he’d never seemed to want more information than that. Reagan and Luke both wonderedif today he might have more questions. If he did, they planned to answer him.
Luke grabbed a quick breath. “Yes. I came here with your mom.” He lifted his eyes to the sky, as if he were looking to the spot where the eighty-ninth floor used to be. “His office was beautiful.”
Reagan’s eyes followed the same path. “He liked you so much, Luke.” She linked arms with her husband. “You told him you could picture having an office down the hall from his. Both of you businessmen at the top of your game.”
“I remember. He had an infectious personality.” Luke turned to Tommy. “You’re a lot like him, Son.”
They were quiet for a moment. Tommy looked up, too, but he couldn’t possibly know what it used to be like here, how it had felt to stand at ground level between two hundred-floor buildings. As impressive as the new World Trade Center was, nothing would replace the way the Twin Towers had looked.
Especially from this close.
“You said you didn’t get to say goodbye to him.” Tommy turned to her. “You mean… you didn’t talk to him? In the days leading up to… that morning?”
Reagan shot a look at Luke.
“Your mother and I”—Luke faced Tommy—“we had every intention of honoring God with our relationship. We had guidelines.”
Tommy didn’t look like he was quite tracking. “You mean you weren’t going to have sex before getting married?”
“Right.” Reagan hesitated. Reliving this part of her life story was always painful. “That was the plan.”
