I was working as a prosecutor at the Attorney General's office. Everything was kind of bustling, like a normal morning. And I think like everybody else, things just quietly started to - there was like a sort of a buzz in the air quietly. Conference rooms started to, people started to congregate and word started to kind of spread around the office, you know, did you hear a plane hit the towers? I walked by a conference room in my office, and it said, I heard someone on CNN say it was flight - I think it was Flight 11 - from Boston to Los Angeles, on American Airlines. And it left Boston at 8 a.m. And that's all I heard is that it left Boston at 8 a.m. I just stopped walking, and I just didn't - I kind of wanted to hear it again. So I went back and I made sure that I had heard it right. And then I went back to my office and I shut my door. I could see my bag with the piece of paper in it. And I did not want to look at it. I just wanted to - I was thinking, well, maybe maybe one news agency got the flight number wrong. Maybe another news agency will have a different report of the flight. So I checked ABC News, CNN, I checked my computer. And they were all reporting that it was that flight from Boston to LA. And while they were doing that they were simultaneously showing these videos of the airplane hitting the tower and just exploding. Where you know that every single person on that plane is just exploding. And I just like, I took a deep breath and I picked up the piece of paper and I opened it up. And that was her flight and everything just - everything just went, I don't know - everything went. And by that point, the airline had released the manifest of who was on the flight. And they had my mom listed and her hometown on the internet. I didn't know what to do because I knew that my dad was probably driving back from Boston. And he probably had no idea. So I think he probably would have just gotten in his car after dropping my mom off and would have been perfectly happy and he probably would have had no idea what was going on. My mom is everything to me, everything to me. It was like they were showing pictures of her blowing up. So I got in my car and I drove to my parents house. But I still didn't know if my dad knew what had happened. So I went to find my dad and he was sitting on the back porch and I said “Dad do, like, do you do know what's going on? Do you know what's going on with mom? Do you? Do you know what happened?” And he's like, “What do you mean? What are you talking about?” And I said, “Dad, do you know what's going on right now with New York, what's going on in New York City? What's going on in Washington?” And he said, no, he's like, “your mom's upstairs.” And I was like, “What do you, Dad, what are you talking about?” He's like, “your mom's upstairs.” He's like, “just go upstairs.” And I went into the living room and my mom comes down the stairs. I swear to God, I almost passed out. I thought I was seeing either a ghost or an angel, or I'm not a religious person, necessarily, but I felt like some kind of like, higher power was bringing my mom to me - because I just saw her die on TV. She gave me a very - she's very, very stern and she's German. And she gave me a very stern hug and said, “Good to see you, Annika.” And I said, Mom, have you watched? Have you seen what's going on on the news? And she said, No. So we went upstairs, and I turned on the news. And I showed her what was happening. Apparently, what happened is she went down, missed her flight. And by the time they were - they couldn't rebook her flight. So she never got on any flight. And the irony is like, my mom doesn't miss, she's never late for anything. She doesn't miss anything. Ever. She's German. She's like, I mean she runs a tight ship. We watched the news for about 20 minutes. And she went outside and she went for a walk. And we've never spoken about it ever. And I've tried to talk to her about it. On the anniversaries, I wish that I could process the tragedy and the sheer terror that I had, and, and I wish I could just sit with her just to share the tragedies of other families with her because I feel when I when I see the other families that lost somebody, I can feel that so deeply. I mean, I really can. That day was so incredible, it was like time just stopped. For so many people. The whole world just kind of stopped spinning. And I remember that moment when time just stopped spinning.

Annika Green