As June approached and the annual survivors meeting crept closer, Walt found himself checking airfare. He returned each year for the annual meeting, selfishly took from the participants whatever spiritual enlightenment he needed to make it another year, and then hopped on a plane back to Jamaica where he drank rum in quiet isolation and tried to undo the damage the trip had caused. It was no way to exist and could not continue. Yet here he was again, caught in a downward spiral from which he could not escape. Something needed to change or he’d swirl down the drain of life and never be seen again. He’d been on the brink with alcohol before the Bureau fired him—retired him, he corrected himself, with his full pension. That was three years ago, and he definitely overindulged now. He hadn’t talked with his parents or siblings in three years, save for a phone call at Christmas. He’d lost just about every friend he’d ever made. The reason behind it all was a woman. The very one he went to New York to see each year. Walt Jenkins gave self-sabotage new meaning.

The New York chapter of Trauma Survivors held its reunion each June in Ascent Lounge of the Time Warner building in Manhattan. It was an annual gathering of trauma victims who had miraculously beaten the odds to cheat death and come out on the other side of life. Alive, yes. But different from the people they had once been. The night consisted of speeches and awards, guests of honor and distinguished charter members, old stories and new. An entire portion of the night was reserved for honoring the doctors and nurses, EMTs and firefighters, and other first responders whose quick thinking and skill had saved every life of every survivor present.

Present this evening were survivors of every kind: A woman who was the only one to walk away from a plane crash that killed eighty-two other passengers; a man who had jumped from a burning car just before it exploded as it crashed down a mountainside; a hiker who had endured two weeks in the wilderness with no food and little water; a motorcyclist who had no earthly reason for walking away from the crash that turned his bike into a jagged ball of steel; and Walt Jenkins, the federal agent who had survived two bullets to the torso—one that tore his neck to pieces, the other that pierced his heart. Ninety-nine times out of one hundred, his trauma surgeon told him, such gunshot wounds were fatal.