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Shane was so nervous he was sure he was going to be strip-searched as a suspected trafficker. His bag was between his feet as his knee nervously bounced and bounced and bounced, watching the clock tick down.

It was 8:09am, and his flight was due to start boarding any minute.

He’d been released exactly 48 hours prior, and the first thing he’d done – after smoking an enormous doob with Cody and Jenna who had picked him up – was buy a plane ticket to New York.

A TV hung above the flight desk, headlines scrolling along the bottom, and he mindlessly watched the endless weather reports and celebrity gossip, trying to keep from crawling out of his skin.

In less than two hours, he’d be on the ground in Manhattan. Laney and Dustin had some meeting in New Jersey with Henry Bard, but Laney said she’d be getting back to their apartment in Manhattan at the same time as he would, by the time he got a taxi through city traffic. He had their address written down on a post-it in his pocket.

Laney…

They’d spoken every day for as long as Midden would allow, Laney telling him everything about her life in New York. She’d made a friend, which was new… Laney had always been such a loner… a girl named Sophie who worked at a bowling alley.

She told him that if Shane didn’t come to her, she was declaring herself a lesbian and marrying Sophie instead.

She was working, doing all of Dustin’s PR although she seemed to suck at that. She was good at the press release packages, the write-ups on the pieces and Dustin’s thought process, peoples’ various interpretations of the work, that sort of thing. She’d always had a way with words. But the talking to the press part… Shane couldn’t believe Henry Bard allowed it.

“What would you like for your birthday,” she’d asked him the day before his release.

“You,” he’d said. “You’re all I want.”

“Well, that was easy,” she’d quipped.

He didn’t feel twenty-one. He still felt nineteen, the age he’d been when he was last with her, the night everything happened. December 24 had cast some kind of spell, keeping him frozen in time, and Laney was the only one who could unlock it.

A woman sat down beside him with a smile, and he smiled back. She was wearing an ugly floral sundress and clunky sandals, crystals dangling from her ears, her frizzy hair loose and unkempt. She reminded him of Nancy.

“Hi,” she said.

“Hi.”

“Nervous flyer?” she asked, pointing at his jittery knee.

“Just… eager to see someone. It’s been a long time.”

“Ah,” she sighed, “a matter of the heart, I take it.”

Shane nodded.

“Well… our mother universe is made of love,” she said. She reached out and grasped his hand. “Listen to Her signs, and you’ll always have access to Her infinite well.”

She petted his knuckles, and then got up and wandered off. Shane had the oddest feeling that he was the only person who could see her.

“Oh my God,” someone gasped. There was murmuring, and people began to crowd around the TV. A golf cart with its lights flashing whizzed by as the crowd grew.

Someone far away started to scream.

“What’s going on?” he asked the harried-looking business man next to him.

“I don’t know,” the man said, nervously eyeing the crowd.

Shane picked up his bag and walked to the desk, the businessman following him, and they pushed through the crowd to where two uniformed women were standing in horror with their hands clamped over their mouths, staring at the screen.

Smoke was billowing out of a skyscraper, the headlines streaming along the bottom of the screen all going blank.

“What is that?” he asked, a dull ring starting in his ears.

“The twin towers,” the businessman said. “That’s the World Trade Centre. In New York.”

People began to run, panic spreading through the crowd like wildfire, but Shane just stood in silent horror and watched as a second plane hit the buildings.

As the two towers began to fall, a mushroom cloud rising up over New York like a nuclear blast, Shane slowly turned around and walked out of the airport.

He was listening to the universe. It had tried to tell him again and again. And it couldn’t be any clearer.

Laney wasn’t his to have.