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December 1991, just days after she attacked her brother.”
    The scene shifts to show a school portrait of an eighth-grade girl with pigtails, her crooked front teeth revealed by a smile that doesn’t reach her eyes.
    Allison knows the terrible story: how one night, Jamie Thompson snapped and attacked her brother with a cast-iron skillet. As the ambulance and police rushed to the scene, Jamie ran away—not seen again until her stabbed, mutilated body was found in an alleyway a few days later.
    When Allison thinks about a girl that age trying to survive alone on the mean city streets . . . well, is it any wonder she didn’t?
    One tragedy triggered another, and so the dominoes began to topple.
    â€œThe jury rejected the insanity defense,” the reporter continues, “convicting Thompson on four counts of second-degree murder.”
    The scene has shifted again, showing footage of a handcuffed Jerry Thompson being led down the courthouse steps past a media mob.
    Allison wasn’t there the day the verdict came in. She had done her part, testifying when she was called as a key witness, but she had no interest in reporting daily to the trial of her friend Kristina’s murderer.
    No, she was trying to lose herself in other things: working as a fashion editor at 7th Avenue magazine, hunting for a new apartment far from the shadow of the fallen towers and her murdered friend, establishing a friendship with the newly widowed Mack.
    Carrie had been in her office high in the south tower when the first plane struck below her floor. She never had a chance.
    Nor did Kristina, who was most likely sound asleep that very night when Jerry crept into her apartment—dressed as a woman, believing he was his alter ego, his dead sister, Jamie—and slaughtered her in her bed.
    Allison and Mack became two more New Yorkers trying to pick up the pieces of shattered lives that September. Two more New Yorkers drawn together by unspeakable tragedy . . .
    And somehow, we fell in love.
    But not right away. No, that would have been wrong. Though Mack had confessed to Allison that his marriage to Carrie was crumbling before she died, he had a lot of grief and guilt to work through before he was ready to move on.
    Earlier that year, Allison had endured a bitter breakup with Justin, a biologist, for whom she’d fallen hard. Bruised, regretting that she’d let someone into her life despite having promised herself that she never would, she wasn’t interested in another relationship. Ever.
    She was there for Mack when he needed her; when he didn’t, she steered clear for her own sake as well as his. She knew she was attracted to him long before anything romantic happened between them, but it felt wrong.
    Then one December night more than a year later, he kissed her—and suddenly, it felt right.
    She tries not to look back at the tragic circumstances that brought them together.
    Sometimes, though, she just can’t help it.
    She stares at the televised photo of Sullivan Correctional Facility, where Jerry Thompson is serving a life sentence. Why is the media dredging all this up again? Is it just another dismal footnote on the heels of the wall-to-wall retrospective September 11 coverage?
    Or is it something much more ominous?
    How many nights has she lain awake—thanks, in part, to her husband’s chronic tossing and turning—and imagined what would happen if Jerry were to somehow escape from the maximum security prison? How many times has she imagined him creeping into her bedroom the way he did the others?
    The great irony in all of this is that she never would have believed—even though she saw him at the murder scene that night—that he was capable of murder. She didn’t know him well, but her gut instinct told her he was innocent.
    Then he confessed.
    So much for my gut instinct.
    That same undependable gut instinct had also made her wary of Mack in the beginning.