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Good Father, Good Listener

Miosotys Fernandez decided to go out with Andrew J. Bailey to stop his best friend from pestering her about it. He is a really nice guy, the friend would say, but Ms. Fernandez only saw a low-key, calm guy -- "very tranquilo," she remembered -- not really her type. "I was used to the thugs and the cuties," she said.

Mr. Bailey, a 29-year-old who was born in England of Jamaican parents and had come to the states as a teenager, was no thug but he did look a little like Michael Jordan. He and Ms. Fernandez had jobs at the World Trade Center -- he was an Advantage Security supervisor for Marsh & McLennan and she was an administrative assistant with the Port Authority -- and after their first lunch date they became inseparable.

They worked out in the morning, had lunch somewhere in the towers every day and went home to Queens, where Mr. Bailey helped raise Ms. Fernandez's three young daughters. He also had an 8-year-old daughter, Veronica. Ms. Fernandez said he was a devoted father, a good basketball player and an even better listener.

On Sept. 11, Ms. Fernandez was coming out of the subway and dialing Mr. Bailey on the 93rd floor of 1 World Trade Center to tell him she was getting breakfast for the two of them when the first plane hit. She lingered in the area, calling and calling his number, until the first tower collapsed.

Ms. Fernandez, 29, keeps calling and leaving messages on his voice mail. "I like hearing his voice," she said. "I tell him that I love him."

Profile published in THE NEW YORK TIMES on November 6, 2001.