Everyone who was in New York on 11 September 2001 has their 9/11 story. My husband and I were at JFK, boarding a plane to San Francisco. Our two sons were home in lower Manhattan, a block away from my 85-year-old mother. They watched the towers fall from our corner. The weather was radiantly beautiful.

For a long time, the faces of the missing were everywhere. Their eyes seemed to follow us from the makeshift shrine outside St Vincent’s Hospital to the window of our local bodega. We cried at random moments. We slept badly.

No one who lived downtown could possibly be surprised by the recently released report about the toxicity of the air during those weeks and months. We inhaled it with every breath. Nothing else has ever smelled like that. I never want to smell that again.

But I also recall the powerful sense that New Yorkers were in this together. Every firehouse was a memorial. We brought flowers, awkwardly expressed our gratitude, paid our respects. Taxis with passengers in them slowed down and gave people rides. People asked strangers if they were OK when they obviously weren’t OK. It was a kind of a joke: if, weeks after the towers fell, you still remained too scared to be in a crowd or an elevator or to take the subway, it meant that the terrorists had won. But like so many jokes, it had a serious undercurrent.

I know that those days weren’t the same for everyone. South Asian and Middle Eastern........

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