But when he still hadn’t shown up or reached out by evening, Mom and I made our way to where the towers had once stood, pictures of him in hand to put up just in case anyone had any information or had seen him. We weren’t the only ones. Hundreds had the same idea as we did, taping photos of their loved ones to walls with phone numbers, desperate for information that no one could give them.

To this day, it was still the most surreal and horrific experience of my life.

We’d eventually learned that not a single person from the company my dad had been meeting with got out alive. There was no way to exit the building after the plane hit. Every stairwell had either been destroyed or was filled with debris or packed with smoke.

Dad never came home.

And instead of falling apart, Mom stepped up. She ran our staffing business, overseeing the daily operations and making sure everything was in the same tip-top shape my dad had left it in. We both grieved in our own ways, but we weren’t alone. The entire country mourned with us, especially in Manhattan. It was helpful at times, but it was also exhausting. We couldn’t go anywhere anymore without someone asking if we were okay or without running into someone who was mourning a loss of their own, barely holding it together. We were forever bound to thousands of strangers by one horrible moment in time.

AFTER HIGH SCHOOL, I’d wanted to come straight here, to the company, but my mom had forced me to go to college, like she and my dad had always planned for. She didn’t want to take away my youth when so much of it had been stolen already in grief.

I begrudgingly agreed with her but ended up dropping out after three years when I realized I was doing nothing but wasting time. My end goal had always been to run my father’s company, and I hated waiting for what felt like no good reason, except to party and get laid. I didn’t need to be in college to do either of those things. So, I left, came straight here, and learned more about my future than I ever could have by staying in school.

I spent the next four years working in every department in the company, learning the ins and outs from each division’s standpoint. Creating relationships with the department heads as well as the employees was invaluable to me and paved the way for how I wanted to run things—with an open-door policy. My goal was to be the boss you could talk to, not the one you talked about behind their back. I wanted to be a problem solver, not part of the problem. It was the absolute best thing I ever could have done businesswise, and I’d been running Martin Staffing and Management for the last five years with my mother silently by my side. Her being here was more for show than anything else, and we both knew it, although neither one of us dared to say that little fact out loud.