Chapter 10

10

"Colleen?" I said, smiling in shock, almost spilling my coffee as I leaped up.

Colleen Doherty was from about as far back in my past as it went. One of the first girls I had ever had a real crush on, she was the older sister of my Bronx Catholic grammar school good buddy, Connor.

And back when I was, what, ten years old, I used to sleep over at Connor's house. On Friday nights as we sat and watched The A-Team and Miami Vice or snuck the remote over to MTV when Mr. or Mrs. Doherty left the room, I would have butterflies in my stomach as I snuck glances at Colleen across the coffee table.

She'd completely ignore me, of course, but like every other boy in the neighborhood who had eyesight, I had been smitten from the first moment I saw the tall black-haired looker.

Because it was not just Colleen's long blue-black hair that turned heads. It was her eyes. She had these icy gray eyes that were bright, almost glowing. They had taken my ten-year-old breath away, that was for sure. Even before I knew anything about anything, I couldn't take my eyes off her. I thought she was like an angel or something.

Talk about getting the blood pumping, I thought as I watched those angel eyes fix on my own again after all these years.

"It really is you," Colleen said. "The shape you're in. Wow! You look twenty."

"You don't look so bad yourself," I said, beaming back at her. "You cut your hair."

"Oh, yeah," she said, touching it. "Years ago. How many has it been?"

My smile suddenly broke as the ancient memories abruptly came to an end.

A dead end.

"Too many," I said quietly.

"Oh, right," Colleen said, suddenly not smiling anymore either as she, too, remembered where we'd seen each other last.

At the funeral of her brother, Connor, a firefighter in the FDNY, two weeks after 9/11.

Like the badass, wild Irish maniac he'd always been, my best friend, Connor, had been running up the stairs of the burning North Tower to save people when the scumbags knocked several hundreds of thousands of tons of steel girders down on top of him.

What really made it so much worse was that their dad, Mr. Doherty, was an ironworker who had worked putting up the Towers back in the seventies.

Like everyone in the NYPD back then, I did my time in the pit of Ground Zero. I had actually met Mr. Doherty down there and worked with him. The whole time in that burnt-metal-stinking landfill mess, I prayed to God that I would find some sign of Connor for his family.

That it didn't happen was disappointing though not surprising.

Like a lot of New Yorkers, God was pretty busy that fall.

"I was going to get a coffee," Colleen said after a beat. "I can come back out if you're staying."

"No, you're not getting a coffee," I said, pulling out a chair for her. "I am. Stay right there, Colleen. Don't move another muscle. What are you having? My treat."

"Please, Mike. Don't be silly," Colleen said, laughing now.

"Colleen, I insist. You must understand," I said, smiling as I pulled open the door. "Fate doesn't play games like this more than once. This may be my last and only chance."

"Only chance for what?" she said.

"Are you kidding me?" I said with a wink. "A date with Colleen Doherty has only been on my bucket list my whole life."