Nicole Reda's house is spotless. She has two young children and no hired help, but there isn't a Tonka truck in sight. The one sign of clutter is basket after basket of warm, crisply folded laundry. You can see your reflection in her living-room floor.
Nicole used to be the messy half of her marriage. Her husband Greg was the family maid, quietly picking up other people's stuff. He wiped the bathroom mirror with Windex after his morning shower and gently insisted that he and Nicole rotate which chairs they sat in so no single cushion sagged from overuse. He actually enjoyed changing diapers. Ever since the Tuesday when Greg, 33, did not return from his 95th-floor office at 1 World Trade Center, Nicole has been the one sweeping and scrubbing. "I think that by cleaning and leaving his clothes in the closet and keeping things just the way he had them, it's like some part of him is still here even if the time is passing," she says.
The meat loaves and pasta from the neighbors arrive on Nicole's doorstep just once a week now. A month ago, she spent--and slept through--her first night without either her brother or her mother camped out on the futon in the computer room. Nicole stopped praying that the rescuers would turn up a wisp of Greg's DNA; on Sept. 22 she buried him without a body or a casket.
Nicole is just 28, but she had already spent nearly half those years with Greg. Both born and raised in Brooklyn, they met the first week of her freshman year at Pace University. They watched Ghost on their first date. Defying the marriage-and-kids-can-wait trend, they bought a starter house on Long Island almost three years ago. Nicole quit her job as a speech therapist to stay home with the children. Greg's hour-and-a-half commute to the insurance brokerage firm Marsh & McLennan started and ended in the dark. But on weekends he was all theirs.
From Greg's work schedule, Nicole divines the only metaphor she can for her current existence: "a never-ending weekday with no Saturday night." There are meetings with lawyers, unreturned calls to charities and memorial services for Greg's colleagues. (In Greg's lunch club alone, only 3 of 8 survived the attacks.) Nearly 500 condolence cards need answering--some from people who met Greg just briefly in a four-day management seminar in August, one from a grade-school classmate recounting how Greg owned the first skateboard on the block. When she comes up for air, Nicole calls to check on Greg's best friend and colleague Michael Cantatore, so sick with grief and guilt that two weeks ago he had a grand mal seizure. He is 34, and has had to strap a heart monitor to his chest.
Michael calls himself "Greg's other wife." The two first met 15 years ago and joke that they "slept together" before Greg and Nicole did--in the same bed on a freshman-year ski trip. Greg later brought Michael to Marsh & McLennan. Michael thought Greg worked too hard and goaded him into taking afternoon outings to buy doughnuts and DVDs. Only in the past few months had Greg really begun heeding Michael's advice to take the earlier evening train so he could spend more time with his second son Matthew, who was born in July.