One bullet had already torn through Layla Bush's abdomen when the gunman came back around.

Her coworker heard him coming and decided to run.

Layla couldn't.

The bullet hit her vertebrae.

Her legs were useless.

Just play dead, the co-worker suggested before bolting from the room.

Layla was in too much shock, and besides, she wanted to

see what was happening around her. So instead, she just stayed put and tried to stanch the bleeding.

She was sitting alone, defenseless, when the gunman returned. And then he turned around and saw me,

and I'm laying on the ground, leaning up against a bookshelf, and he looked me in the eyes.

And it's a weird moment of intimacy where your life is in someone else's hands, and they're looking at you, and you realize they see you, and they still pull the trigger.

Layla Bush was one of six women shot July 28, 2006, at the Jewish Federation in Seattle, Washington.

One of her coworkers died.

The shooting made international headlines in part because that type of thing was rare back then.

We had about two dozen mass shootings in the U.S. in 2006.

Ten years later, there were 173, according to the Gun Violence Archive at ShootingTracker.com.

But this isn't a story about mass shootings in America.

This is Layla's story, the story of a 23-year-old Seattle transplant who was working her first real full-time job when a bullet changed everything.

From the Cincinnati Inquirer and The Trace, this is Aftermath, a podcast about gunshot survivors.

I'm Amber Hunt.

Layla Bush calls herself a geek. She was always a geek, she says. In high school, she was a math geek.

As an adult, she became a gaming geek. These days, you're most likely to find her

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