A Shark Attack and a Terrorist Bombing: This Is a Love Story (2024)

There's a reason the man and woman sitting on the mangy couch hold hands. They've endured what you and I have not, and what they’ve endured has led them to question whether to live. You see it in their faces, in their bearing, in the shared glances before speaking, a weighted maturity that slumps their shoulders and draws into sharper contrast their youth: he with his shaggy reddish-brown hair and childlike freckles, she with her olive complexion and taut cheekbones and tattoos up and down her arms.

When a catastrophe happens, they say, you can choose to see it as random, as they each have. Randomness, though, is “a hard thing to come to terms with,” she says. A random life is a chaotic one, a meaningless one, ultimately a hopeless one. On the other hand, to view catastrophe as fated, which they have each done as well, is no better. “You ask, ‘Why me? What have I done to deserve this?’ ” the man says. A fated life is a guilt-stricken one, an angry one, ultimately a shameful one.

There’s a way out of this paradox. Finding the way out is the point of their story, they say. Finding the way out has given them a wisdom about life that haunts them. It is also a wisdom they would never trade. It explains why they’re sitting next to each other, on a ratty couch in a tiny rental a continent away from everything they know, and, yes, still holding hands.

He remembers the moments just before. Water lapped against Colin Cook's legs as he straddled his surfboard a hundred yards from the shore of Leftovers Beach, on Oahu. He remembers the sun’s warm glow in the east, a little after 10:00 a.m., and that he had been out some two hours already. He remembers being exhausted but happy—the dopamine high that rushes the system after a long workout. He looked the part of a seasoned surfer that October morning in 2015. Broad shoulders, lithe build, his V-shape frame snug in board shorts and wet-suit top.

He’d moved here for moments like this. Drifted farther west from his childhood home in Rhode Island for the waves and natural charm of the islands, all the schools of fish and Hawaiian sea turtles he saw beneath his board that morning. Out here, at age twenty-five, he could live life slowly. Back east everyone lived at the frenetic pace of achievement. Almost as an act of defiance, Colin had first come out to Oahu and rented a literal walk-in closet for a living space. The closet was close to a master bedroom in a two-story house owned by the guy Colin worked for, a manufacturing entrepreneur and surfer himself. The closet was four feet wide and fifteen feet long—with the cot Colin bought to sleep in, there was no room to maneuver. But the closet was steps from a front door that opened onto the beach and the ocean.

He owned fifteen surfboards but just four shirts back in 2015. He acted like a pro surfer even though he wasn’t one. He told himself in those days he didn’t want to turn pro. He thought competitions would taint what he loved. Instead he glassed, the slow, careful process of fiberglassing and sealing surfboards. It was not at all the job his dad lived as a sports-apparel executive and not the life his sister had created as an Ivy League graduate. Many times a month, Colin tormented himself amid the beauty of Oahu with questions about why he didn’t have his father’s ambition or his sister’s intelligence. The questions made him feel smaller than his five-foot-ten-inch frame. The only answer that quieted his mind, he had found, lived in the barrel of the next wave.

I’m just gonna get a couple more in, he thought that morning in 2015. A couple more waves before paddling in to get ready for work.

Then.

The force felt like an eighteen-wheeler. He was instantly underwater and disoriented from the impact and then above water desperate for breath and then pulled under once more, even more violently.

Colin opened his eyes and saw the flash of a tiger shark, twice as long as he was, biting down on his left leg. He punched the shark on its nose. Once, twice, again and again and again. Its skin felt like sandpaper against his fist. The shark thrashed from the blows, butted Colin, then pulled away. Colin rose to the surface. Panicked, panting, he grabbed his surfboard to try to paddle to shore. He looked behind him to trace the shark but saw something else.

His left leg: no longer attached to his body. His left leg, just above the knee: gone. Blood reddened the blue waters.

Colin saw the shark’s fin close on him.

“Help!” he yelled. “Shark attack!”

Two surfers nearby looked toward him and began to swim frantically to shore.

I’m going to die out here, Colin thought.

Already the shark was on him. Its eyes, its nose, good Lord its teeth. Colin pushed and punched, pushing and punching for his life, and somehow the beast turned from him again.

But now the first three fingers of Colin’s left hand hung at nauseating backward and sideways angles—

—and he went underwater once more.

The leash, a thin cord that looped around his left foot and connected him to his surfboard, was now hooked around the shark’s teeth, while the other end of it remained tied around Colin’s left ankle. The shark thrashed its head side to side, trying to rid itself of the leash, ripping the ocean’s surface. At last the shark freed itself of the leash and Colin scrambled back up onto his board. The open wound of his left stump shot out blood in time with his heartbeat. A pool of it now, twelve feet around him.

His vision blurred, darkened. Colin fought to stay awake.

In that fight, time warped.

Suddenly a large Polynesian man stood near him on his own surfboard. The man clubbed the shark with a paddle he held in both hands until the shark swam away.

The man tossed his own surfer’s leash to Colin, but Colin couldn’t grab it for his mangled hand and the blood that dripped from the rope, slickening it.

The blurred vision, the darkness again.

Then the water, the waves. The shark returned, its dorsal fin parting the water even faster than it had the first two times, the beast more furious than ever.

No way they’d both survive.

“Tell my family I love them,” Colin gasped.

They, too, remember the moments before. Celeste and Kevin Corcoran and their daughter, Sydney, were watching runners sprint and jog and hobble toward the finish line on that April afternoon in Boston, an overcast spring day in 2013 that carried a biting wind. Sydney, seventeen at the time, wore a tank top, T-shirt, sweatshirt, and down jacket. It was 47 degrees but a party there on Boylston Street. The Boston Marathon, held on Patriots’ Day, was always a citywide party: The Red Sox had played their annual morning game at 11:00 and beaten the Tampa Bay Rays 3–2, and now the crowd migrating from Fenway Park to the marathon’s finish line about a mile away was jovial and beery.

Celeste and Sydney inched between the revelers and the metal fencing the city had erected along the sidewalk. The mother and daughter got looks—they always did. Celeste had the raven hair and coiffed appearance of a woman who’d been in the beauty industry. For fifteen years she worked at a hair salon a block over, on fashionable Newbury Street. Sydney had her mother’s flawless complexion and dark hair. Celeste’s sister, Carmen—Sydney’s aunt—was running her first marathon, and they all planned to celebrate when she finished. Around 2:45 p.m. Celeste and Sydney jostled their way even with the yellow finish line and peered down Boylston Street, waiting for Carmen to come into view.

In that delay, amid the noise and energy around them, it was hard not to cheer for themselves a bit, too.

It had been just three years since Sydney, then fifteen, crossed a pedestrian walkway near a relative’s beach house on Massachusetts’s North Shore and was struck by a car. Sydney flipped up and bounced off its windshield and hit the pavement so hard that her older brother, Tyler, was sure she was dead. Well after Sydney awoke in the hospital, well after she was released, even, the brain bleed and swelling caused such headaches that she could attend her public high school in Lowell, Massachusetts, only every other day. By the time she bunched close to Celeste at the finish line that April afternoon, Sydney had worked through three years of physical pain, anger, guilt, and depression. She finally felt peace. They waited for Aunt Carmen to come into view, waited to celebrate not just Carmen’s achievement but Sydney’s. The worst, Celeste said, was behind them.

Then.

A noise loud enough to go unheard and blow out Celeste’s eardrums. She felt as if she’d been flipped in the air. She looked around. Black smoke clouded Boylston Street, blown-out plated glass was scattered across the sidewalk, and blood—blood everywhere. Celeste tried to sit up and couldn’t. Tried to locate Sydney and couldn’t. Kevin came into her vision and told her he was going to cinch her legs with a belt. She looked down and saw that her legs dangled by the skin around her knees. The blood pumped out in time with Celeste’s heartbeat. Kevin tied the belt tight, then tighter still, hoping to stanch the flow of blood. It pumped onto his hands, so he cinched the belt tighter, and the pain was so excruciating Celeste thought she wanted to die.

Out of Celeste’s line of vision lay Sydney. A pressure cooker, part of the detonation mechanism in the homemade bomb that had just exploded, had rocketed across the finish line, through Sydney’s right quadriceps, and snicked the femoral artery of her upper thigh, then lodged near her hamstring.

Sydney was bleeding out, there on Boylston Street.

Sydney could feel something was wrong. Her right leg wouldn’t move the way her brain was telling it to. There was too much smoke to make sense of why. Too much smoke to locate her parents. People ran around her. Their faces looked terrified. Some were covered in blood.

Where are Mom and Dad? she thought. Am I an orphan now?

The ringing in her ears. The smell of burning flesh. The smoke all around. She needed to leave this scene. Sydney focused her attention, and as she put pressure on her right foot to stand, she passed out.

She came to. Two men hovered about Sydney now. One was a Marine who was tying a tourniquet made of T-shirts and fastening it tight around her leg—she gasped from the pain. The Marine then told another guy, Matt, a gray-haired guy in a plaid shirt, to put pressure on the wound in her leg.

Matt did. This was worse: the pressure and pain of fingers gripping her flesh. Matt pinched her femoral artery to try to stop the bleeding. Then the men worked to fasten the tourniquet tighter still. Excruciating. Matt and later a third man, Zach, wearing a gray New Balance T-shirt, were removing her shoe; there was blood coming from her left foot. Sydney’s thoughts moved beyond the pain. Are there more bombs? Will I survive them?

Her vision blurred, then darkened.

Matt pressed his forehead to hers. “Just squeeze my hand, keep talking,” he said.

She nodded, but time warped. When she came to, she was in a medical tent, erected for marathon runners and now for survivors of the bombing. A battlefield triage unit where people took scissors to cut off her pants and said to each other, as if she couldn’t hear them, “Her eyes are white! Lips are purple! Get her in an ambulance!” She wanted to say how much this talk scared her, but the exhaustion. She couldn’t speak. She was so cold. She wished her family were here. Why was her family not here?

I am an orphan, she thought.

She was in an ambulance and a tourniquet—the one from the street? a new one?—was tied tighter still and pain pulsed through her leg with every pothole and corner while someone hovered in and out of her vision and everything turned white and fuzzy.

I know I’m going, she thought, and I had an okay run.

A spreading serene sensation. Still the low rumble of tires over Boston’s streets, still the syncopated movements of a person, or people, carrying out tasks with urgency, but now a warmth of care emanated from these others, mirroring the warmth that spread inside Sydney.

This is one of the most peaceful moments I have ever known, she thought.

A hospital bed, the next day, where Colin Cook looked around the white room at Queen’s Medical Center in Honolulu and remembered snippets of the lost hours.

The large Polynesian surfer, his chest to his board, and Colin sure he’d die. Words that floated in a fever dream . . . “two inches above the left knee.” The need to repair the fingers of his left hand mangled by the shark. And now this moment, the second day, coming off heavy medication and the pain at the sites of the surgeries and a serene sensation that spread through his body. My God, I am alive, he thought.

His dad, Glenn, and older sister, Cassie, arrived first. When Glenn got the news the day before about the attack and Colin’s emergency surgery, he knelt down to pray and instead a scream rushed out. “You are not going to take him! You’re going to take me!” And now to see his Colin, maimed by the shark but having beaten it back. And alive—alive. Pride surged through Glenn as he blinked back tears.

A doctor knocked and entered and said he was here to check Colin’s vitals. Colin took the occasion to peek at his phone.

What are you looking at, Col? Glenn asked.

Watching a live feed of the North Shore’s waves, Colin said.

Everyone chuckled.

The doctor told Colin he’ll be lucky to walk again.

Colin stopped chuckling.

Colin's mother arrived next. He and Mary Beth had always been close. Before his parents’ divorce, when Colin was little, Glenn traveled a lot for work and Mary Beth had to find ways to play to Colin’s strengths. That meant dirt bikes for the son who thrilled to danger, as well as carpentry lessons from Mary Beth’s father because Colin could not sit through a school day, much less excel there the way Cassie could. His ADHD diagnosis didn’t resolve his troubles in school. His school life wrecked his confidence. Always shy, Colin became anxious as the years progressed. He had a few friends but no large social circle, no long-term girlfriend. Mary Beth became his confidante, his center. She soothed his frustrations as he did his homework. While she made dinner, she answered his questions and gave him advice. She watched him surf, even in Rhode Island’s frigid winters, when the waves were gnarliest, he in a bodysuit, she in her car in a winter coat.

The only life that made sense to Colin involved surfing. Surfing quieted the story he told himself: that he was not good enough. The truth is, he’d never thought he was good enough to be like his big-time executive dad or his sister. Just like he’d never thought he was good enough to turn pro. He had the proficiency; other elite surfers in Oahu said as much. But Colin couldn’t get himself to say it. The same went for dating. He’d never found a girlfriend despite his chiseled build and kind manner because any conversation with a girl turned awkward: He constantly overanalyzed what he was saying and not saying until he was barely saying anything at all and she walked away.

Only Mary Beth and surfing could pull him from his most vulnerable, most self-lacerating thoughts. Only Mary Beth and surfing could answer the question that plagued him now in the hospital room.

He drew her close. “Mom, when do you think I’ll be on a board?”

What hope can I give here? she thought to herself. How do I break it to him he’s never going to surf again?

But his exhausted and sedated body, his gray-white complexion from the blood loss: She couldn’t destroy him when he was this weak.

“One day,” she told him. “You’ll be back on your board one day.”

Colin ate the meals his family ordered in. Friends came to visit him, and then surfers he didn’t know, men and women who had seen the reports of the attack on TV news—and then the surfer who’d lived through it, too. One day in that week Colin was in the hospital the large and muscular Polynesian man knocked on his door. He said his name was Keoni Bowthorpe. He was thirty- three, with the square jaw and stubbled chin of an action-movie star and a family lineage that stretched back a century on the islands. He said he’d clubbed the shark on the nose numerous times, more than Colin remembered. He and Colin were way out there, Keoni said, some 150 yards from shore—almost beyond the breakers. When Colin gasped, “Tell my family I love them,” Keoni knew Colin was about to die and, out of desperation, ditched his paddle, the only weapon he had, the only thing saving them, and heaved Colin onto his back and lay chest down on his surfboard and swam for it. The shark followed the whole way, bumping against them. Keoni’s muscles burned, but they were still so far from shore.

Keoni leveled with Colin in the hospital room. God was in the ocean, he said. Keoni had three small kids and a wife. In the months prior to the attack, he had been tempted by a job on the mainland that would provide for his family. Yet some force had told him to stay on the islands. Not just stay there but grow stronger as a surfer and swimmer.

“God prepared me to save your life,” Keoni told Colin. “And God has been preparing to save your life, too.”

Colin wanted to believe what Keoni said, wanted to believe that he could will his life back to its old existence, but when Keoni left, and later still when Colin was alone in the hospital room, he searched on his phone for surfers who’d lost a limb above the knee and returned to surfing. He found a few people—in the world. None with a prosthetic that allowed them to surf the way they once did.

There’s no way I’m good enough, he thought.

Beneath the glare of fluorescent lighting, amid the beeps of the machines tracking his vitals, Colin bawled. A new thought arose.

What if the attack was not the worst of it?

A fate worse than the attack itself moved through Kevin Corcoran’s mind as doctors rushed Celeste into the emergency room at Boston Medical Center. They would have to amputate, doctors told Kevin. He knew Celeste’s life would always be cleaved now into before and after—but that was not the worst of it.

Why hadn’t he been able to find Sydney at the finish line? He had been a few feet behind Celeste and Sydney when the bomb exploded. He’d seen its force blow Sydney back. Upend her.

This article appeared in the October/November 2024 issue of Esquire
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Obliterate her? Was that why he couldn’t locate Sydney amid the smoke as he fastened the tourniquet around Celeste’s legs, ignoring the lacerations on his own? Celeste had kept asking where Sydney was, and Kevin hadn’t been able to see her anywhere on Boylston Street and didn’t have the courage to tell her what he feared.

Instead he said, “Sydney’s okay.”

Now, at Boston Medical, with Celeste in surgery, Kevin bawled.

He and Tyler, Sydney’s big brother and best friend, asked and asked and two hours later received word: Sydney was alive and here at the hospital. Doctors had to remove veins from her left leg to create, in essence, a new artery in her right, and even then blood pooled at the site of these repairs and physicians had to slice open her right calf to relieve the pressure. But soon Sydney was conscious and recovering and, eventually, put in the same room as Celeste.

Celeste, still groggy from her own surgery, was taken into the recovery room and saw her daughter: matted hair, a gray complexion from the blood loss. Celeste looked down at her own legs and what wasn’t there, then reached across the bed stand to grip what was.

For hours, Celeste and Sydney held the other’s palm.

Colin took his prosthetic leg in his hands and shimmied and grimaced and pulled until, at last, it was on. He was back in his childhood home, a ranch-style on Seapowet Avenue in Tiverton, Rhode Island, where the saltwater estuary just beyond the Cooks’ backyard wended to the Atlantic. His dad lived here now, and while Colin recovered, Mary Beth rented a place nearby to help out.

Colin’s new leg was a heavy, cumbersome, ill-fitting thing, and when he rose in the living room to try to walk, he stumbled to the floor. The nerve endings at the edge of the residual limb were causing him pain. The skin needed to callous over the limb and help desensitize the nerves. No matter the attempts, Colin couldn’t figure out how to walk on a prosthetic that felt to him always like some awful ski boot, its rigidity unforgiving. This leg seemed to offer such a poor imitation of the knee’s flexion: how the knee grounds and balances movement. Surfing felt further and further away. Doctors told him it would take time to get comfortable with the prosthetic, but time passed and the situation did not improve. The nerve endings, the electric pain shooting up his leg when he stood on the prosthetic, how he could not walk more than a few paces before the pain and exertion overwhelmed him and he stumbled again to the floor. The question of a fate worse than the attack haunted him. Nothing, not swimming at the Y or doing push-ups in the basement, alleviated it.

The burgeoning reality of a diminished life followed him and his mother onto a flight to Florida in February 2016. When they arrived in Orlando, Colin relied on crutches to get around, and his dread trailed him right up to their destination: the twenty-three-thousand-square-foot Prosthetic & Orthotic Associates.

With its darkened glass entrance and a rehab facility that stretched for a city block, POA billed itself as different from other prosthetic centers. Its founder, Stan Patterson, a burly buzz cut of a dude who shook Colin’s and Mary Beth’s hands, had roughly a dozen patents and an on-site fabrication lab where a silicone cast of a residual limb formed the outline of, eventually, the perfect prosthetic, he said.

“We’ll have you walking in a week,” Patterson added.

Colin scoffed. Gave a faint smile. He hadn’t walked since the shark, and now—what?—Stan from Orlando would succeed where the prosthetists up north, with their Ivy League affiliations, had failed?

Patterson sensed Colin’s doubt. He took Colin and his mother to the vast rehab room. Among the dozens of amputees trying out new legs, Patterson led Colin and Mary Beth to a middle-aged woman with pearls and diamond bracelets wrapped around the ankles of her two prosthetics.

Her name was Celeste Corcoran. She said she was a patient here. Her accent was all Massachusetts all day long, which made Colin and Mary Beth feel at home.

Colin had learned in the past few months the joke among amputees. When asked how they lost their leg, many said, as casually as possible, “It got bit off by a shark.” When Celeste asked Colin what happened, he deadpanned, “Shark attack.” It took a moment, but when she saw the truth she cackled. She started calling him Shark Boy.

Celeste told Colin and Mary Beth about the bombing and the shared hospital room with her daughter and not just the hand-holding but the despair when Celeste looked at her body. Her legs ugly and short and bruised purple and red at the lines of amputation. What was missing mocked her. She felt a sharp physical pain in the lower legs that were no longer there, a condition known as phantom- limb syndrome. What was there atrophied, shriveled before her just like her future. She was sure of it. At night in the hospital, when she thought her daughter in the bed next to her was asleep, Celeste sobbed.

One day at POA she showed Colin and Mary Beth a photo of Sydney. Mary Beth remembered seeing Celeste and Sydney in an interview on the Today show after the bombing. Sydney’s voice was hoarse from her being intubated days earlier, but in that interview they refused to be victims. “If you have the spirit and you know that you want to do it—I can absolutely achieve it,” Celeste said.

Celeste told Mary Beth and Colin that POA granted her first new legs and then a new spirit—and that Sydney was now just as resilient and mature. Her classmates at Lowell High had named her prom queen weeks after she was released from the hospital, and reporters had camped outside, waiting her out like paparazzi. Sydney chose a strapless, cream-colored dress, walked in on crutches, and wore her crown when the TV cameras and photographers asked to see it.

As Celeste flipped through to more recent photos of Sydney, without her prom crown, her beauty still had an almost regal air.

At the end of Colin's week at POA, Patterson helped him into a new, custom prosthetic. Because of the company’s patented process of using the silicone cast to shape a prosthetic rather than fitting a generic one onto an amputee’s leg, Stan’s prosthetic fit snugly around Colin’s knee, felt made for him, with some give to it but without the pain at the nerve endings of his limb like he’d had with others. With an above-the-knee amputation like Colin’s, Patterson demonstrated how to swing his hip to move his leg. Hip swing, step forward. He walked alongside Colin. Hip swing, step forward.

Patterson drew back. Colin took his first steps, tentative, unwieldy, still painful steps—but moving, my God, walking again.

He smiled and let loose a yip of a laugh, the way he used to out on the water.

Taking it in, Mary Beth cried and looked to Celeste. She was crying, too.

Celeste and Mary Beth became more than friends. They became coconspirators. In the weeks after POA, after they’d returned to their respective homes, they’d phoned and texted and settled on a goal: somehow get Colin and Sydney in the same room.

Colin was oblivious to all this. Preoccupied. The success at POA, that new and refined leg, had refined his obsession, too. Somehow he had to surf again.

The demand for surfing prosthetics was limited, and those limited offerings all assumed the same thing: The surfer had lost a leg below the knee. No above-the-knee prosthetic was on the market, perhaps because it was too hard to fashion one. How would a company mimic the ball joint and solidity of the knee and then the equally individualized curvature of any one person’s calves and their quite individualized feet on the board?

That was why an above-the-knee surfing prosthetic didn’t exist. It was too hard to manufacture. It was too hard to scale what was manufactured. From his childhood living room, then, Colin sketched on drafting paper what his individualized surfing leg might look like. Less a metal rod, stiff like a wooden leg out of a pirate movie, than the curved blade that some Paralympic sprinters now favor. Its flexion allowed for people to run as hard and, for some, as fast as they once did, which meant it could allow Colin to be athletic on the board—to squat and pivot. What he needed was a curved-blade prosthetic that connected to a ball-socket knee, and then Stan Patterson’s upper-leg prosthetic that fit snugly to Colin’s limb.

Colin had two childhood friends, Brendan Prior and Max Kramers, who were engineers in Rhode Island. He asked them about the carbon fiber they used on manufacturing projects and whether it might be used to create his new surfing leg.

The trio’s first iteration of an above-the-knee, surfing-ready prosthetic was fine for standing and walking—like the leg from POA—but the blade was too long for Colin to squat on his board. The next try had a blade of the right length, but the knee joint wasn’t sturdy. When Colin pivoted hard, the knee joint buckled and flew out behind him. How would any manufactured knee ever withstand the rush of water against it?

That wasn’t the only problem. As they went on making leg after leg, the trio noticed that the carbon-fiber tip of the bladed lower leg—Colin’s new foot—provided little balance when he pivoted laterally. They tried to fit the blade inside a sneakered foot they manufactured, but it sucked. The sneaker slid off wet surfaces.

What about a foamed composite foot? they thought. Something to which the carbon-fiber blade attached—something that at the foot’s sole worked almost like a sponge in the waves, absorbing water but not sliding off the surface of the board.

Within days, the three friends set about creating a foamed foot working with the same composite materials used in high-end sailboat racing that support a whole industry in Rhode Island. Soon these foamed composite feet littered the floor of Colin’s house. He wanted something sticky enough to pivot on a wet surface but not so sticky it felt glued down. No foot did exactly what Colin needed. Five feet became ten. They piled throughout the house. Glenn Cook watched the feverish work and smiled. This was who Colin was and always had been. “OCD,” he said.

Colin sketched small changes. Jotted down thoughts. Tried to will the clock at home to 5:00 p.m. so he and Prior and Kramers could begin work on that night’s improvements. His mom kept nagging him about some charity event up in North Chelmsford, Massachusetts, but it barely registered. For weeks Colin kept his focus on his designs, right up until the literal hour his dad told him they needed to leave for the event.

The night was a fundraiser for 50 legs, a nonprofit that helped cover the cost of prosthetics. After the marathon bombing, Celeste Corcoran received her own prosthetics from 50 Legs. She’d be there tonight as an honored guest, and Colin’s parents told him that her daughter would be there, too.

Colin threw on an old flannel and a pair of pants he rolled up on the prosthetic side. He’d rather get this event over with and get back to his designs. Glenn drove him. Mary Beth, encouraged by Colin’s improvement, was back in Georgia, where she now lived, but gave Glenn strict orders based on the plan she’d hatched with Celeste Corcoran: Whatever it took, get Colin and Sydney together. A big event, too many people, almost two hundred, with hors d’oeuvres, a full bar, and a band. Oh, man, Colin thought as he walked into the hall. This is gonna be awkward. Colin could double- and triple-think his every move in a space this loud and cavernous. Could get so self-aware and ill at ease he’d go mute.

And now here came Celeste—fast-talking, high-energy Celeste—shaking Colin’s hand and introducing herself to Glenn and already ceding the floor to what she hoped would be the night’s main attraction, Sydney Corcoran.

She wore a black dress cut above the knees. She was twenty-one now, three years after the marathon bombing, and her dress made no attempt to hide the surgical scars that ran along her toned right leg. The tattoos up her arms and around her back told the story of how she had learned to own her life. You saw in her eyes what she’d told her mother: She was tired of the immature “boys.” She hoped to meet a man, someone who’d been tested by life and was now confident for having endured those tests. The way she’d become.

She sought out Colin’s gaze, and what Colin mustered was . . . “Nice to meet you.”

The moment stretched out. Got awkward. Colin was taken by Sydney, sure, but mostly flustered by her beauty, her maturity, above all his ever-nagging sense that whatever he said would be wrong and he wasn’t good enough to say what would be right. So he said little at all. Sydney had nothing to work with.

She walked away.

Later, Sydney and Celeste talked to stragglers and each other but not Colin, still across the room, cutting eyes at Sydney but not approaching her. Glenn could hear his ex-wife’s voice in his head and knew he had to intervene. He walked over to Sydney.

“Hey, listen,” Glenn said. “This is how he’s always been. If you want to try to connect, you need to get his number.”

She nodded. Her mother told her what had happened at POA, how Colin came to trust that he could walk again. Maybe he’d understand her, like why she’d enlisted her whole family to try group psychological therapy. Maybe he’d get why she had a tattoo of a lion across her back and the words choose to live across her wrist.

She crossed the floor of the hall, now nearly empty.

“Hey,” she said when she got to Colin. “If I gave you my number, would you ever text me?”

The traffic was god-awful, and Sydney was so late to their first date that she and Colin had to wolf down their dinner. Colin could barely eat anyway because of his nerves, convinced he’d say something stupid. He kept excusing himself to the bathroom, sure he was about to puke.

They barely talked. Then they went to a movie where they couldn’t talk at all. The Huntsman: Winter’s War was somehow a sequel to Snow White and the Huntsman and was as bad as you’d imagine. Colin walked Sydney back to her Volvo SUV and didn’t try to kiss her, didn’t think he deserved to. He watched her drive away and got back on the highway to Rhode Island. His phone rang.

Sydney.

She asked if he was still in the parking lot. When he said no, she said that was too bad. If he were, she’d drive back and give him a kiss.

They agreed to a second date, which led to more dates and, for Colin, a sense of unease that he’d somehow screw up a good thing. About a month into their relationship, his anxiety peaked when he drove to the Corcorans’ place north of Boston near the New Hampshire border, where Sydney and her parents moved after the bombing, a large house that’d been configured for the wheelchair Celeste used when the pain in her legs became unbearable.

Colin tried to be lighthearted with Celeste and Kevin—Celeste still liked to call him Shark Boy—but in a moment when it was just Colin and Sydney in the living room, he turned to her.

“What do you even see in me?”

She blanched, unsure if he was serious.

He went on: “Isn’t it weird that I’m an amputee?” As in, How many amputees do you need in your life?

My God, he was serious. “Look out that window,” she said.

He saw the green expanse of the front yard, set a full acre back from the road, on a bright summer day.

“Look for all the fucks I give,” Sydney said.

Colin laughed, and she did, too. She told him his experience didn’t burden her. She liked it. She painted the fake toenails of her mom’s prosthetics all the time. His life was one she understood. She’d been that close to death, too. Now she was here, with him.

In the days ahead, Colin called and texted, more play ful in these messages with Sydney than he’d been with any other girl. Meanwhile, he and his buddies kept adjusting his surfing leg and foamed foot. One day he told his dad he was heading out, too excited and nervous to say where.

He went to the beach and, for the first time, tested his surfing leg. Out among Rhode Island’s low and lolling waves, the knee buckled beneath him. The joint couldn’t withstand his body weight and the water rushing against it. The foamed foot kept slipping off the board. The experiment didn’t go well at all. As he swam back, something happened inside him, though, or rather failed to happen. No well of despair rose within him, as it once would have. Was this Sydney’s influence? Some surge of trust she’d given him? He didn’t know. He just redoubled his efforts back on shore. He and Prior and Kramers tightened the flexion of the knee joint, hoping that a more rigid knee would support him on the board.

Days later, Colin made a second trek to the beach. The many months of fittings and adjustments to this surfing leg had been both frustrating and at times painful. His left limb was not fully desensitized, and Colin had to rest, recuperate, between strapping the leg on and trying again. On this new day, though, he felt like he was close to creating not only a prosthetic that no one else in the world had but also something like a new self. He felt he was creating a new Colin.

At the beach, he did the arduous work of attaching his surfing leg. He lifted his board and swam out. On the first big wave, he pushed up—

—and the foot stuck. He maneuvered on the board, pivoted, water crashed against him and . . .

The knee held. The foamed foot absorbed water.

He pivoted again and realized it:

MY GOD, I’M SURFING!

When he got back to land, Sydney was the first person he told.

The more he surfed, the better he felt, until he reached a decision that shocked even him. I want to win competitions with my new leg. I want to turn pro. It was crazy: Colin Cook, competitive surfer. And yet that’s what he wanted now, and maybe always had. Maybe he’d always been unable to admit a desire to himself for fear of failing at it.

To surf as a pro, though, meant that the puny waves off Rhode Island or Massachusetts wouldn’t do. Hawaii was great, sure, but the rents: Sydney knew the story of Colin living in that walk-in closet. So Sydney and Colin decided to move to southern California, where Colin had extended family and Sydney’s administrative job had an office and work in the surfing industry—almost every pro needed a day job—was plentiful. Colin found one designing surfboards in Ocean side, the beach town an hour south of L. A. Sydney and Colin got a place near the water in Laguna Niguel. And bit by bit, their lives fell apart.

It was the distance from Sydney’s family. Her mother was her inspiration and her brother her best friend. Her family on both sides had lived for generations in New England, and though Sydney had thought she would live elsewhere, she didn’t feel nearly as poised and confident now as everyone had always assumed she was.

She knew the truth. There was the bombing, and then the days, months, and—she should be honest—years when she relived it. When she felt uneasy in any new situation. The Vietnamese American writer Viet Than Nguyen once wrote, “All wars are fought twice: The first time on the battlefield, the second time in memory,” and Sydney knew it to be true. The war never ends with the war’s end. In fact, she began to wonder in California if she had ever been poised and confident.

Because the dread had begun almost immediately after the bombing. Sure, she had projected strength for the Today show and The Boston Globe, but she was also (mostly?) a scared young woman who had nearly been killed in a car accident and then found herself at the finish line of the Boston Marathon and thought as she recovered from this, her second near-death experience, The universe doesn’t want me here. Death was following her. She had been sure of it. When she and her mother had shared that hospital room, Sydney stared at what the bomb had taken from Celeste. What had Sydney done wrong in her life to do that to her mother?

She thought this all the time. Then her thoughts turned suicidal. The part of Sydney that still wanted to live held fast to the one thing she could still control: what she ate.

She would limit it at any meal or, just as often, skip the meal entirely and work out like a fiend. The physical therapists who attended to her in Boston, the news-camera crews that trailed her for follow-up stories—they all kept saying how committed she was to her rehab, walking and already regaining full mobility despite the massive stitching up and down and round her legs, tying her forever to that spring day on Boylston Street.

What poise she had, they said. What resilience.

What bullshit. The thoughts spun blacker in the weeks and months after the bombing, and so the workouts ran longer and the anorexia took a still stronger hold. Then the nightmares began. In one, the most vivid, Sydney crawled through a U. S. Army obstacle course, down in the mud, avoiding the barbed wire above, and then jumped to her feet and ran. All around her she saw and heard explosions and gunfire and, now, tracking her, gaining ground on her, mere feet from her, the Boston Marathon bombers, homemade explosives in their hands and hatred in their eyes.

She woke yelling and drenched in sweat. She tried therapy for the PTSD and anorexia. It helped. But the dark thoughts returned, or the nightmares did, or the desire to control it all did. She couldn’t focus at Merrimack College and had to drop out.

She met Colin Cook and he offered an answer. After his attack, he said he was never scared of sharks. That astounded her. He even convinced Sydney about six months into their relationship to travel to Hawaii with him, return to the very waters that had taken his leg, and swim with the sharks there. She was so nervous that day—but Colin wasn’t. With local shark experts guiding their swim, including Keoni Bowthorpe, the guy who’d saved his life, Colin got in the ocean miles from the shores of Oahu and swam right next to the Galapagos and reef sharks. He let them swim around him. They were close enough to touch. Back on land he shrugged it off. “The ocean is their home,” he said. It amazed her. Inspired her.

He made her feel good. Strong. Especially when his own insecurities—like a searing self-doubt about making it as a surfer—rose up. Sydney from the start intuited how to buoy him and soothe him, in the way that “Look for all the fucks I give” had made him laugh at her parents’ place and relaxed him.

She felt useful around Colin, in other words, as the relationship deepened. She knew him better than he did. She felt loved. And this led her to love him all the more.

She agreed, then, to create a new life in Laguna Niguel but now in California saw how war was indeed fought twice, and the uneasiness, the dread of new places and situations—they returned. She realized she had been able to help Colin only because of how well her mother and father and brother had helped her back in Massachusetts. In California she felt malnourished again. Her homesickness wasn’t a homesickness at all. It was the severing of an identity. It didn’t matter how many times a day Sydney called home. Calling home five times a day made it worse. It didn’t matter that their neighbors were friendlier than people on the prickly East Coast or that their cozy two-bedroom apartment in Laguna Niguel sat atop a hill whose sunsets from their window turned the whole neighborhood a soft and inviting gold. Sydney felt unmoored in California, leading an existence that was as quietly bleak as it had ever been after the bombing.

What made it harder still was how Colin thrived out here. He had his job, California’s big waves, an ever-expanding group of bros to surf with. With Sydney’s encouragement he’d found Paralympic-style surfing competitions and was about to unleash his New Colin on them, he said.

The usefulness she offered no longer felt good. She cried every night, and most mornings, and a good chunk of each afternoon.

Colin was at a loss.

“Can you, like, try to be happy?” he asked.

“I’m trying. I’m really trying.”

They never settled on a plan for their future. They continued to live their shared present, a loving and day-by-day-improving present but one where the past intruded, for both of them. By 2019, Colin had competed in many adaptive-surfing competitions and won the U. S. Nationals twice but faltered both times at the World Championship in California. At Worlds, it was as if he were back in that cavernous hall in North Chelmsford, Massachusetts, meeting Sydney: The stage seemed too big, with too many other great surfers, too much searing self-doubt.

The past’s intrusiveness and the way Sydney and Colin could help each other focus on the here and now bound them, deepened their love. Sydney reminded Colin as he prepared for the 2020 Paralympic championships—first a statewide competition, then nationals, then, if he qualified, Worlds—that he himself talked of how he wanted to be more than the victim of his attack. Winning Worlds would serve as evidence of a man who had not only bested that day but moved beyond it. “You’ll win when you can believe it,” she told him.

That was the problem, he said, his oldest of problems.

There’s no way I’m good enough for that, Colin thought.

He took regionals and then nationals again, and in mid-March 2020, in what would be the last days before Covid-19 shut everything down, Colin stepped onto the beach of the International Surfing Association’s World Para Surfing Championships, held north of San Diego, on the shores of La Jolla.

A packed stretch of sand: 131 surfers from twenty-two countries. Colin paced the beach on the opening day of the five-day competition.

He couldn’t silence the voice that seared him and demanded perfection, but when he got in La Jolla’s waters for his first heat at Worlds, the inner critic did what it had always done: quieted enough so Colin could focus on winning the heat and advancing to the next round.

It went like this for four days. Colin won and won. In fact, he performed so well in each heat, with the judges back on the shore grading him on the quality of the wave and how he rode it, that he was the favorite heading into the finals.

On that morning, the fifth and last, he thought about how he shouldn’t screw this up but would anyway because that’s what he always did at Worlds.

Sydney heard it: in the hotel room, on the beach. The self-talk that he mumbled before the previous two Worlds and, frankly, at so many points throughout their four-year relationship. I’m not sure I can do this. I’m not sure I want to. Why am I even here?

She approached and looked deeply into his eyes. It stopped the talk and Colin’s closed-loop pacing.

“You are a great surfer,” she said. “Do this for the love of surfing.”

Soon the three finalists hit the water: Colin, Eric Dargent of France, and Naomichi Katsukura of Japan.

In the eyes of his loved ones—Mary Beth and Sydney holding hands on the beach, his dad watching the finals live stream from Rhode Island—Colin seemed to be the same Colin he’d always been. He waited and waited, letting the other finalists take waves, waiting for the perfect one that he alone could ride. Demanding perfection from himself.

But out on the water, what his loved ones couldn’t see, what the surfing judges couldn’t even score, was everything fading away. The competitors, the stress. The world narrowed until there was only Colin and the waves and Sydney’s mantra.

“Do this for the love of surfing.”

He knew what she really meant.

And now the perfect wave crested and he rode it. Then another perfect one. He rode that, too.

When he reached the shore the evidence from the judges was irrefutable.

They married in April 2023 in a civil ceremony on the beach of Oahu’s North Shore, she in a lace wedding gown and he in shorts and a Hawaiian floral shirt. Not just the location but the date held significance, April being the month they met and 2023 being the tenth anniversary of the Boston Marathon bombing, a day that, ultimately, led them to each other. Getting married ten years later “claims the date for ourselves,” Sydney said.

They live in Hawaii now, on Oahu, in a tiny rental on the North Shore, and when they talk about their experiences and how the way out of the paradox of life is love for someone greater than that for yourself, Sydney and Colin often look at each other and hold hands on their small couch. It was a risk, moving still farther west from Lowell, but Sydney has found here what Colin has always cherished. On their afternoon hikes to the top of one of Oahu’s lush mountain peaks, taking in the Pacific, or on their morning walks for coffee in sandals, Sydney likes the island’s slowed-down life that dwells on the moment before them, which they’ve learned is all they really have. She’s better. The dread and, in particular, the severing of self are things of her past. She’s also taken the advice she gives Colin. She ignores the fear that rises when pursuing the life she wants. Her journal entries have morphed into writing she’s looking to publish. She’s quit her nine-to-five—she never liked the corporate life—to make candles she ships to an ever-burgeoning list of mainland clients.

Surfing was an Olympic competition in this year’s summer Games, and adaptive surfers could compete in future Paralympics. Colin is looking toward a future in which he might be Colin Cook, Olympian. Even he laughs at how big his dreams have become.

Sydney still shapes them. She has to. Colin wakes in the morning now wanting to surf but is sometimes terrified a shark will bite him. The war’s return: Something about actually moving out here, something about Hawaii being permanent now, has also reanimated for Colin how the sharks never left either.

The PTSD took six years to surface, and these days, on the worst days, it keeps him from riding the waves. The only thing that saves him is Sydney. When his panic is a physical pain in his chest, she guides him to the beach. She watches while he latches on his surfer’s leg. Most days she says nothing.

Then he breathes out and after a nod from her tiptoes his way into the water. “Just knowing she’s back there . . .” he’ll later say but not be able to finish for how much her presence on shore means to him in the water.

By the time the first wave hits, he’s fine. New Colin.

He surfs, he improves.

When he comes in, she’s still there, and the two of them, holding hands, walk home.