Her feet left the bridge railing.
For three seconds she hung in the red-stained air above the river, her dark hair floating upward, her tear-streaked face tilted toward the sky she hadn't been looking at, her hands open and empty at her sides.
Then the sky took her.
Three time zones east, in a concrete apartment with a broken radiator and a wall calendar still showing last month, a woman named Fatima was watching the news on a tablet propped against a water bottle.
She was built in the way that made furniture feel inadequate — wide hips, heavy chest, the kind of body that drew eyes in the street and made her spend considerable energy ignoring the fact that it drew eyes in the street. She was wearing a large sleep shirt and nothing else, sitting cross-legged on her mattress, watching the BBC feed with her dark hair loose around her shoulders.
The news anchor was saying nine million.
Fatima was watching the footage of the Shinjuku woman's phone hitting the pavement.
