In the group of survivors, Ms. Mayers, 49, was in the worst shape. For the first few months, she got cold sweats from nightmares. Many nights, her husband had to hold her as she shivered, trying to sleep. A native of Barbados, she once flew home regularly to visit her family. Now, petrified of flying, she refused to go anywhere. Driving home in traffic on the Garden State Parkway became a white-knuckle test as she fought the urge to get out and flee.

She had previously thought of herself as a strong woman. Now she was a wreck, unable to even ride the amusement park rides she used to love with her teenage son.

A Christian, she concluded that God must have had reasons for sparing her.

''I personally feel that God has a job for me to do,'' she said. ''I say to him, 'I'm here, whenever you're ready.'''

Ms. Mayers's colleague, Mr. Ng, a 48-year-old business analyst, had the opposite response. Organized religion had never sat well with him. Now, he had even less use for it.

The best way to move on, Mr. Ng decided, was to keep things ''as normal as possible.'' He stopped talking about the event and shielded his wife and teenage son from news coverage. Under the dictate of normalcy, he resisted the urge to be more demonstrative in his affection for them. For vacation, he took his family on the same camping trip in northern New Jersey that they always took. Anything more extravagant, he reasoned, might alarm them.

For the first anniversary, several in the company thought they might travel to ground zero. In the end, Ms. McIntyre, whose fiancé is an elevator mechanic who also escaped the trade center, was the only one to go. The others turned on a television in a conference room and those who wanted to drifted in to watch some of the ceremony. Ms. Barnett and Ms. Mayer elected to stay home.

Ms. McIntyre continued to believe strongly that talking about things helped. In May 2003, she organized a ''girls' lunch,'' ostensibly for National Secretary's Day. Her real purpose was to feel out how they were doing. The group, made up of women who had been in the office that day and those who were not, went to an Italian restaurant nearby.