One Tuesday Morning & Beyond Tuesday Morning Compilation by Karen Kingsbury

Author:Karen Kingsbury
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: Zondervan
Published: 2003-02-02T22:00:00+00:00

THIRTY-TWO

DECEMBER 4, 2001

By the end of the second week, Jake had no doubt that he'd been a businessman working in the south tower when the building collapsed. Somehow halfway down the stairwell he'd met up with a man who must've been Jake Bryan.

There, he must've fallen and been helped up by him, and in the process Jake must've lost his helmet. That's when Jake would've seen Sierra's picture and her name. The rest of the way down, he would've known that the firefighter who'd looked so much like him wasn't going to get out of the building alive. And that the little girl, Sierra, wasn't going to have a daddy after that awful morning.

The moment must've been so powerful that it was the only one not erased from his long-term memory when the south tower collapsed and shot him beneath the fire truck.

That much of the story—as wild and crazy as it was—finally made sense both to him and to Jamie. But other details were slow in coming. The blonde woman had appeared in many flashbacks since that first one two weeks earlier. She was his wife; he had no doubt about that.

Some of the scenes he remembered now were so vivid they made him cry. Times when he and his pretty wife had first met, and the two of them would sit outside some small outbuilding, her singing while he played the guitar. The love he felt for her in those moments was overwhelmingly real. But it clashed strongly with memories that felt more recent, memories of him rushing out the door to spend another weekend at the office—wherever he worked.

He had enough pieces of the puzzle now to know that he'd been nothing like Jake Bryan.

Though his memories told him he'd loved the blonde woman at first, though he'd celebrated the birth of the son they apparently shared, he had let everything about their love grow cold. All so that he could get ahead in whatever business he'd been involved in.

And something else hit him. Somehow he remembered having a daughter, but never actually holding her. Nothing about her face or voice flashed in his mind, but her presence was real all the same. He wondered if he was only thinking of Sierra, wishing her to be his, or whether there really had been a little girl in his life, maybe a child he and his wife had lost.

He hoped that someday the memory of her would make sense.

In his quiet moments, when Jamie was playing outside with Sierra and he was able to spend time remembering, he found it sadly ironic that a job might've become more important than his family. A job he couldn't even remember now.

And then there was the matter of his faith. He was fairly sure he'd been a believer before the terrorist attacks, but his faith must've grown cold in recent years. All of that had changed, of course. God had allowed him to become the husband and father he'd never really been, by living in the shoes of a man who no longer was.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.