She was thirty-two and just starting to show.
We’ll call her Maria Santiago, and she worked on the 93rd floor of the North Tower of the World Trade Center as an administrative coordinator for a financial services firm. Every morning, she took the A train from Brooklyn, clutching a thermos of peppermint tea and the latest book on pregnancy her sister had mailed her from Puerto Rico. She had just begun to feel the flutter of tiny kicks beneath her ribs—small reminders that another life had begun.
On the morning of September 11, 2001, she woke early, kissed her husband Miguel on the cheek, and packed a lunch of avocado and tomato sandwiches, avoiding deli meats like her doctor warned. Before leaving their apartment, she paused at the mirror and placed her hand on her belly.
“Sixteen weeks today,” she whispered.
The subway was late, as usual, but the towers were waiting—monolithic and sure, cutting the sky like punctuation marks. Maria stepped into the elevator with a yawn and a smile, rising above the city just as the sky cracked open.
At 8:46 a.m., American Airlines Flight 11 struck the North Tower between the 93rd and 99th floors.
In that instant, time unraveled.
Glass shattered into wind. Walls bent like paper. Smoke swallowed the ceilings. Somewhere, Maria fell. Somewhere, she covered her stomach with her hands. Somewhere, she whispered a prayer in Spanish no one would hear.
We will never know her final thoughts, only the silence left in her place—the baby shower that never happened, the crib still boxed in a hallway closet, the ultrasound appointment circled on a calendar that would never turn.
Maria Santiago became one of nearly 3,000 victims of the 9/11 attacks. But she was also one of the unborn—one of the 10 or 11 pregnant women estimated to have died that day, carrying lives that never saw their first breath. Their names are rarely spoken. Their children were never given names at all.
And yet they existed.
Two heartbeats.
Two lives.
Both lost in the smoke and fire of that clear September morning.
It is tempting, sometimes, to focus on the numbers, the towers, the horror. But what lingers are the small things: the warm sandwich waiting in her bag, the hand on her belly, the second heartbeat that had just begun to echo.
Maria Santiago mattered.
So did her child.
And in remembering them, we remember not just how the towers fell—but who we lost when they did.