Epilogue #3
I distinctly remember being in sixth grade—eleven years old—sitting in Ms. Abramowitz’s classroom, working on a worksheet about the water cycle, when the principal’s voice crackled over the intercom.
Something about an incident at the World Trade Center.
They said that teachers needed to turn on the television.
They wheeled in a TV on one of those rolling carts. We all sat there watching, not really understanding what was happening. And then my mom’s face appeared on the screen.
She was reporting live from the CBS studio, her voice calm and steady, explaining what little they knew. I remember feeling this weird surge of pride—that’s my mom—mixed with fear because why was my mom on TV when something this bad was happening?
And then the second plane hit.
I watched my mom’s composure crack right there on that screen. I watched tears visibly form in her eyes and stream down her cheeks as she cried out, “Oh, dear God! So many people…” Her voice broke. “So many good Americans have just died.”
The classroom went silent.
That moment changed everything for her career. It was the first time the country saw her not as a journalist, but as a person. A New Yorker. Someone who loved this city and was grieving alongside everyone else.
Her ratings went up after that. She became the face of CBS News for a lot of people. The one who told the truth but also felt it. But for me, it was just the day I watched my mom cry on live television while Lower Manhattan burned to ashes.
New York City was never the same after that day. The world wasn’t. There was a clear before and after. Before 9/11, and after.
We lost so many people that day. Good people.
Family friends. Mr. Stavros from my father’s department at Columbia.
He’d been in the North Tower for a conference.
His wife called our house that evening, hysterical, asking if anyone had heard from him.
My parents stayed on the phone with her until 3 AM.
The Marconis from the Italian restaurant on our block. Their son was a firefighter. He went into the South Tower and didn’t come out. They closed the restaurant for a month. When they reopened, they hung his photograph on the wall, right next to the register. It’s still there.
And Sal.
Sal from the pretzel stand near Central Park. He had a thick accent, a handlebar mustache, and was always the first person to smile at you when you walked by. He called me piccola and gave me free pretzels my entire childhood. He often told my mother I was “the sweetest bambina” he’d ever met.
He’d been visiting his daughter. She worked on the 95th floor of the South Tower. Neither of them made it out.
I was too young to fully understand it then, but I was old enough to understand that the world had fundamentally changed. That the Twin Towers were gone. That Sal was gone. That nothing would ever be the same in the world from that day forward.
“Earth to Emma.” Phoebe waves her hand in front of my face. “You okay?”
I blink. The kitchen swims back into focus. Michalis is arranging cheese on a platter. Cori is adjusting the crooked banner.
“Yeah.” I shake my head slightly. “Sorry. Just thinking.”
“About?”
“Nothing. Just…Mom. And everything.”
Phoebe loops her arm through mine. Her grip is firm, grounding. “Well, tonight we celebrate her. Twenty-five years of kicking ass and taking names.”
“Twenty-five years of being the smartest person in every room,” Cori adds.
“Twenty-five years of making Dad look like he married up,” Michalis calls from the kitchen with a smirk. We all know he’s joking—Michalis is a self-proclaimed Mama’s Boy through and through.
Even so, I call back, “He did marry up!”
It’s true. My father is brilliant. He’s a neuroscience professor at Columbia, published author, one of the most respected researchers in his field. He has a mind for details, for systems, for understanding how things work.
But my mother? My mother is a force of nature.
She doesn’t just report stories. She changes them.
She’s spent twenty-five years telling truths that people didn’t want to hear, holding power accountable, giving voice to the voiceless.
She’s done it while raising three children, while supporting my father’s career, while navigating the endless sexism of an industry that has always tried to reduce women to their appearance and their likeability.
She is the most formidable person I have ever known.
Cori suddenly stops trying to straighten the banner—a losing battle if I’ve ever seen one—and throws both hands up in exasperation. “Oh my god! Who was in charge of all this?”
I look at Phoebe and stick my thumb back toward the kitchen. “That would be your boyfriend, Phoebs.”
Michalis is standing at the counter, elbow-deep in the cheese platter. He chews, swallows, and says with his mouth still full, “I tried!”
Cori snatches her thick red hair into a messy bun, securing it with a hair tie she’s produced from somewhere on her person—moms always have hair ties, it’s like a superpower—and shakes her head. “Well, you’re useless.”
Phoebe snickers into her hand.
Michalis smirks, completely unbothered. He crosses the room in three long strides, wraps his arms around Phoebe from behind, and drops a kiss onto the top of her head. The height difference is absurd. She’s at least a foot shorter than him, craning her neck just to look up at his chin.
“I’m going out to my car,” Cori announces. “Thank god I thought to grab some last-minute things.” She pauses at the door, surveying the wreckage of the living room one more time. “Where the hell is Allie?”
As if the universe has a perverse sense of comedic timing—the front door swings open and my little sister strides in like she’s walking a runway in Milan.
“Relax, everyone.” She pushes her sunglasses up onto her head, surveying us like a queen greeting her subjects. “I’m here.”
Allie is wearing black jeans so tight they’re practically painted on, a white crop top that exposes a sliver of her toned stomach, and oversized sunglasses that she has no reason to be wearing because it’s overcast outside.
Her dark hair—the same shade as Dad’s, a rich espresso brown—falls in loose waves past her shoulders, artfully tousled in a way that took her at least forty-five minutes to achieve.
I stare at her. “Did you go to the caterer?”
She blinks slowly, innocently. “What caterer?”
“To pick up the rest of the food. And the decorations. Like we talked about. Last night. On the phone. For twenty minutes!”
A pause. “Oh.” Another pause. “Shit.”
“ALLIE!”
“I had no idea I was supposed to do that!”
“I literally texted you the address!”
“I thought that was for later!”
“For later when? Later tonight? Tomorrow? Next week?”
“I don’t know, Emma, I’m not a psychic!”
I groan and press the heels of my hands into my eyes.
Being the oldest is exhausting. I love my little sister—I do, fiercely, desperately, despite all evidence to the contrary—but Allie drives me absolutely insane.
She has been driving us all insane for her entire eighteen years of existence, and I have the premature gray hairs to prove it.
Here’s the thing about Allie: she is somehow the most responsible and the most irresponsible person I have ever met.
Responsible enough to have a legitimate modeling career at eighteen.
She’s already done campaigns for Ralph Lauren and J.Crew.
She’s been in Teen Vogue. She has an agent and a portfolio and a separate email account just for booking inquiries.
She graduated as valedictorian of her class this spring.
She speaks three languages—English, Greek, and enough French to get herself into trouble in Montreal.
She does her own taxes. She manages her own finances.
She negotiated her own contract with the agency, without a lawyer, and got better terms than anyone expected.
But she cannot—cannot, will not, is constitutionally incapable of—remembering the smallest, most basic tasks that anyone asks of her.
Pick up the dry cleaning? Forgot.
Feed the cat when we’re out of town? Forgot. (The cat survived. Barely.).
Show up to family dinner? Late. Always late. Fashionably late, she calls it. Disrespectfully late, Mom calls it.
Allie has been a wild child since birth.
I have distinct memories of her as a toddler, scaling the bookshelves like a tiny, drunk rock climber while my parents tried to negotiate her down with promises of snacks.
At five, she cut off all her hair with kitchen scissors because she “wanted to see what would happen.” (What happened was that she looked like a very angry baby bird and refused to leave the house for two weeks.) At twelve, she “borrowed” Mom’s car and drove it two blocks to the bodega because she wanted Skittles and didn’t feel like walking.
She’s the reason our parents have gray hair. Every single strand.
“Alexandra Marie.” Cori’s voice cuts through the room like a blade.
Uh-oh. Full name. That’s never good.
“Really?” Cori’s arms are crossed, her foot tapping. “You had one job.”
“I didn’t know it was my job!”
“Emma literally texted you!”
“I get a lot of texts!”
“From who?” I ask with a laugh, unable to help myself. “The man-bun poet?”
Allie’s eyes narrow to slits. “His name is Devon and for your information, he’s very talented.”
“I’m sure he is.”
“You don’t even know him!”
“I know he has a man bun.”
“So?”
“So that tells me everything I need to know.”
“You’re such a snob, Emma.”
“I’m a realist.”
“Can we focus, people?” Michalis, still standing at the cheese platter, has somehow eaten half of it. I don’t know how. I’ve been watching him the entire time and I still don’t know how.