“It was not my fate on that morning. It was just my luck to have survived”: on September 11th, 2001, around 8 a.m., Michael Lomonaco didn’t go directly to the 107th floor of the World Trade Center's north tower, where he was the chef of the restaurant Windows on the World. “My lens was scratched and I needed a new lens,” he explains, recalling how he went to a glasses shop to fix them. Minutes before leaving the store, at 8:46 a.m., he felt the shock of the Boeing 767 hitting the tower. The 79 employees of the restaurant and dozens of customers were trapped at the top: no one survived. 20 years later, from his current restaurant, Porter House, the chef recalls the events of that day: “It's now part of who I am, that I carry with me the memory of people in a way. And it's an obligation to remember them.” IMAGES AND SOUNDBITES