Of course I was reading Twitter when it happened, in an office in One World Trade, awash in the newsflow. I looked up and saw colleagues gathered at the window, looking up the Hudson. Almost at the same moment, the news came over my screen: shots fired on the West Side Highway, a truck, bikers hit. I walked over to see. It was that dollhouse view you get from a high floor of an office building: little toy cars and green ball fields and puffball trees in neat lines, and then the river, all perfect and under glass, a long way away. The blue sparkle of police lights for a mile up the West Side Highway, traffic stopped, people gathering in clumps to gawk. I trolled the web for images and saw the rented Home Depot pickup—$19 a day. Twisted bikes, a body under a sheet. More than I wanted to bear, and I turned away. The cops had shot the guy who drove the truck, but he was alive. Good, the fucker. No martyrdom for him. Rot in jail.

And my other thought was: some people are going to have some very hard days. But not us. New York has brought us these kinds of pictures from time to time. We’d seen terror, we’d heard the plane (“Don’t look, daddy. There are people jumping,” a close friend of Nicholas’s said to his father on that day), and, in my little circle, we’d had more than our share of death. Biking home later that afternoon up Lafayette, I thought of how inured to these events we’ve become, after 9/11 and all these years, and I thought that was a good thing, healthy. This again? Really, by now, terror is the wrong word.

But the next day, a friend called: our friend Nicholas Cleves had been among those killed in the attack. Nicholas had been biking back from Whole Foods to his mother’s business on Hudson Street, where he’d gone to get avocados for a dinner that night, and stopped for lunch. He’d called his mother to tell her he was heading home. He was almost back to Houston Street when the truck hit him, one of the first. (In the tangled, chance-encounter lattice of people’s paths through the city, another friend came upon the terrible scene while biking to his job at a shoe store, and saw a mangled dog, the bikes, a body.) Nicholas’s mother, knowing where he’d been, seeing the news reports, was frantic. She went to the bike path, now behind police tape, and buttonholed cops who, having heard it all before, weren’t that moved by the frantic mom of a 23-year-old—the kid could be anywhere, he probably went to a friend’s. No one knew anything. She and friends went to police precincts, then from hospital to hospital, the bureaucratic runaround, holding out hope, looking for news. Finally, after 11, an officer came to her door.

We’ve known Nicholas from birth. His parents were close friends and housemates in Long Island for several years. Like most people in our circle, they’d come to New York City to pursue their artistic and cultural dreams, Richard Cleves from Taunton, England, and Monica Missio, from Arlington, Massachusetts. How lucky we were to have discovered this marvelous playground, endless doors to walk through, behind some of which we met our friends, spouses, found our futures. Fragile, preposterous ambitions engendered years of toil and drift and blissful focus. Nicholas was the first child born among our close friends, and like several others, an only child, whether due to medical issues or, more often, finance, the seductions of the city, or the slow-burn arc of our careers. Giving birth, Monica came close to death. After that, Richard’s hair, in a famous story, went white. They’d had a great romance in the 1980s, and together they ran a small lighting-design business that had flourished at times, and struggled, too.