Monica Iken lost her husband Michael on 11 September 2001, when he was killed at his desk on the 84th floor of the World Trade Centre's South Tower during the terrorist attacks. The couple had married just eleven months earlier, and Michael's final words to Monica on the phone were about people jumping from the windows before the line went dead; his body was never recovered. A quarter of a century on, she describes learning to live with milestones he never got to see, including what would have been their silver wedding anniversary.

The pair had met exactly two years before the attack, on 11 September 1999, in a Manhattan bar, where Michael reportedly told a friend he intended to marry her after spotting her the previous week. Monica, now 56 and a bond broker's widow, has since built a life around preserving his memory, visiting the Ground Zero memorial to feel closest to him, and has gone on to find love again with a firefighter. Michael was one of 2,977 people killed in the attacks that day.