For Amina, that August 7th started like any other Friday. Her husband, David, a quiet man with a laugh that filled a room, had dropped her at the Teachers Service Commission offices on the fifteenth floor of the Co-operative building. It was a clear, brilliant morning in Nairobi. She'd shared a last laugh with him in the car, teasing him for being too careful with their baby daughter in her new carrier. Her colleagues were bustling with the usual pre-weekend energy.Meanwhile, in a bank a few floors below, a new employee named Oscar was diligently writing a check. He heard a smaller explosion first—a sharp, percussive sound like a tire bursting. Just as his curiosity turned to concern, he heard the second, an earth-shattering blast that erased all other sound from the world.Up on the fifteenth floor, Amina felt the building shake violently. She ran to the window, her heart pounding with a nameless dread. The world outside turned into a kaleidoscope of flying glass and dust. She was thrown backward, landing hard on the floor as the office crumpled around her. Glass became a rain of knives, piercing her skin and shattering the fragile clarity of her eye.The dust, thick and suffocating, became a ghost, obscuring everything. When the quiet finally settled, it was not a peaceful silence but a heavy, mournful void. She could hear nothing but a ringing in her ears and the soft groan of a collapsing world. Her colleague, Lilian, found her and helped her to the stairs. The descent was a walk through a nightmare—every step was a collision with a body, a chilling reminder of the people who had been on their way up just moments ago.Oscar, his building also devastated, had survived by sheer instinct. He had resisted the urge to look out the window. Many who had perished were those who had done just that. He crawled out, battered but alive. But a new, invisible injury had taken hold. A pervasive mental stress and post-traumatic stress disorder, compounded by a medical condition that produced a foul odor, followed him. The rejection he would face in the years to come would leave him more scarred than the blast itself.David, Amina's husband, arrived at the hospital in a panic, carrying their baby. His search for Amina was a desperate race against time. When he finally found her, she was covered in blood, with a vacant stare from her injured eye. Her face, which he loved for its softness and warmth, was now a map of pain. Their life together, once built on simple joys, was now defined by surgeries and medical bills.The physical scars would fade, but the invisible ones would linger for Oscar and Amina. The psychological trauma, the financial burden, and the struggle for recognition from both the Kenyan and U.S. governments would become a new battleground. In their struggle, they would learn that a bomb blast is not a single event. It is a long and painful story that begins with a sudden noise and lasts a lifetime.