TWO HORRIFIC ATTACKS ... ONE FOREVER LOVE STORY

COLIN COOK REMEMBERS the moments just before. Water lapped against his legs as he straddled his surfboard 300 feet from the shore of Leftovers Beach on Oahu.

- Paul Kix

He had been out some two hours already, and he felt exhausted but happy. He looked the part of a seasoned surfer that October morning in 2015. Shaggy reddish brown hair, broad shoulders, lithe build, his 5-foot-10-inch frame snug in board shorts and a wetsuit top.

He’d moved to Hawaii from his childhood home in Rhode Island for moments like this. Out here, at age 25, he could live life slowly. Back east, everyone lived at the frenetic pace of achievement. Almost as an act of defiance, Colin had come out to Oahu and rented a literal walk-in closet in a house owned by the guy he worked for, a manufacturing entrepreneur and a surfer himself. The closet was 4 feet wide and 15 feet long—with the cot Colin bought to sleep on, there was no room to manoeuver. But it was steps from a front door that opened on to the beach.

Colin owned 15 surfboards and acted like a pro surfer even though he wasn’t one. He told himself in those days that he didn’t want to turn pro. He thought competitions would taint what he loved. Instead he glassed—the slow, careful process of fiberglassing and sealing surfboards. It was not at all like the career his dad had as a sports apparel executive and not the life his sister had created as an Ivy League graduate. Amid the beauty of Oahu, Colin tormented himself with questions about why he didn’t have his father's ambition or his sister’s intelligence. The only answer that quieted his mind, he had found, lived in the barrel of the next wave.

I'm just gonna get a couple more in, he thought that morning in 2015. A couple more waves before paddling in to get ready for work.

Then the force hit him like an 18-wheeler. He was instantly underwater and disoriented from the impact and then above water desperate for breath and then pulled under once more, even more violently.