A tightrope walker crosses between the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center as thousands of spectators watch from below.

Corrigan and Ciaran grow up in Dublin with their mother after their father abandons the family.

The brothers' mother dies, leaving the two young men to navigate life without parents.

Corrigan joins an order of monks in Belgium and is eventually assigned to do missionary work in New York City.

Corrigan establishes his South Bronx ministry, befriending local prostitutes and elderly residents of a nearby nursing home.

Ciaran travels to New York to be with his brother after IRA violence escalates in Dublin.

Corrigan meets Adelita, a nurse at the nearby nursing home, and falls deeply in love with her.

Police arrest the South Bronx prostitutes, and Corrigan accompanies them to court to offer support.

Blaine and Lara's car strikes Corrigan's van on the road home from court, causing a fatal crash.

Jazzlyn is killed at the crash scene, and Corrigan dies in hospital with Ciaran and Adelita at his bedside.

Claire hosts a Park Avenue breakfast gathering for mothers who have all lost sons in the Vietnam War.

Tillie commits suicide in her jail cell, unable to endure the weight of her grief and guilt.

The tightrope walker appears before Judge Soderberg and receives a symbolic fine of a penny per floor of the World Trade Center.

Gloria persuades Child Services to let her take in Jazzlyn's two orphaned daughters and raise them as her own.

Jaslyn, now a grown adult working at a nonprofit in Arkansas, travels to New York to say goodbye to the dying Claire.

The novel opens with a tightrope walker's daring crossing between the Twin Towers, an act of beauty that reverberates through the lives of dozens of New Yorkers on a single day in 1974. The Corrigan brothers' journey from Dublin to the South Bronx forms the emotional spine of the story, culminating in Corrigan's death in a car crash alongside the young prostitute Jazzlyn. In parallel, wealthy Park Avenue resident Claire grieves her Vietnam-fallen son alongside a circle of mothers, while Tillie Henderson spirals toward suicide in her jail cell after Judge Soderberg hands down a crushing sentence. The novel's quiet acts of grace emerge in the aftermath: Gloria takes in Jazzlyn's orphaned daughters and raises them as her own. Decades later, one of those daughters, Jaslyn, returns to New York to sit beside the dying Claire, closing the loop on a story about how grief, love, and chance bind strangers together.

The headline events that define the novel's central story.

Crowds gather below the Twin Towers, uncertain whether the solitary figure on the rooftop intends to jump to his death.

Corrigan begins studying for the priesthood in the years following his mother's death.

Corrigan gives away his absent father's suits to the poor on the day of his mother's funeral.

Corrigan confronts local pimps in the South Bronx while defending the prostitutes in his care, enduring physical beatings.

Ciaran arrives in New York and is disturbed to find his brother living in poverty in a dangerous housing project alongside prostitutes.

Tillie takes the blame for a robbery charge to protect her daughter Jazzlyn from serving additional jail time.

Lara retrieves Corrigan's personal effects from the hospital and delivers them to his grieving brother Ciaran.

Lara attends Jazzlyn's graveside funeral and encounters Tillie, who has been temporarily released from jail for the ceremony.

Ciaran and Lara share drinks at a bar after the funeral; she feels drawn to him but turns away from her feelings.

Fernando photographs elaborate graffiti tags on New York City subway cars, documenting a defining moment in urban art.

Fernando captures a photograph of the tightrope walker suspended high above the city streets.

Three computer hackers in California use phone networks to follow the tightrope walk from thousands of miles away.

A secretary working near the World Trade Center describes the tightrope performance to the California hackers in real time over the phone.

Gloria is mugged and injured on her walk home from Claire's Park Avenue apartment.

Jaslyn arrives at Claire's apartment and finds Claire's nephews occupying the space and treating her with cold dismissiveness.

Before the tightrope walker is understood, the crowd fears the worst — this opening uncertainty sets the novel's tone of suspended dread giving way to wonder. Corrigan's backstory deepens through his choice to study for the priesthood and his symbolic act of giving away his father's abandoned suits, gestures that define his character before he ever reaches New York. Secondary players Lara and Fernando each respond to the day's events in their own way: Lara is driven by guilt to attend Jazzlyn's funeral and meet Ciaran, while Fernando instinctively photographs both subway art and the famous tightrope walk. Three California hackers follow the event through phone lines, receiving only a secondhand echo of something happening far away. The pool closes in 2006 as Jaslyn navigates Claire's apartment and the subtle racial tensions waiting for her there, before finding her way to the old woman's bedside.

The supporting moments and parallel storylines woven through the narrative.

The anxious crowd below the Twin Towers realizes the rooftop figure is a tightrope walker performing, not a person about to jump.

Ciaran is wounded in an IRA bombing in Dublin, prompting his decision to leave Ireland and join his brother in America.

Corrigan drapes one of his own shirts around Adelita's shoulders in a moment of tender, restrained, and charged intimacy.

Corrigan whispers his last words to Adelita as he dies in hospital — that he saw something beautiful.

Marcia is triggered at Claire's breakfast gathering when the subject of the news helicopter filming the tightrope walk is raised.

Claire is privately unsettled by the tightrope walker story, feeling it cheapens her son's death in Vietnam.

Blaine dismisses all responsibility for the fatal crash while Lara is overwhelmed with guilt over the two deaths she witnessed.

The tightrope walker's elaborate secret preparations and years of practice for the Twin Towers crossing are revealed to the reader.

Tillie reviews her entire life in jail, drowning in guilt over having drawn her daughter Jazzlyn into prostitution and addiction.

Judge Soderberg sentences Tillie to a long prison term for the robbery charge, sealing her fate as a woman already destroyed by loss.

Adelita and Corrigan finally sleep together the Thursday before the crash, consummating their long-restrained love.

Adelita tells Corrigan she loves him and will always love him, fully declaring herself despite the weight of his conflicted vows.

Gloria returns to Claire's apartment after being mugged, and the two women form a deep and lasting cross-racial friendship.

It is revealed that Lara eventually overcame her fear of love and married Ciaran, joining two lives shaped by the same catastrophe.

Jaslyn lies beside the dying Claire and reflects that the world keeps spinning and life, even now, is enough.

The novel is structured around moments of revelation — what appears to be a suicide attempt turns out to be an act of impossible grace, establishing the book's central tension between fear and wonder. Corrigan's inner life is defined by the war between his vows and his love for Adelita, played out in charged scenes of restrained intimacy before their love is finally consummated the Thursday before the crash. Blaine's indifference and Lara's guilt place two people at opposite poles of moral response to the same catastrophic event. Judge Soderberg's harsh sentencing of Tillie — contrasted with the walker's token fine — exposes the class and racial injustices underpinning the entire story, and Tillie's stream-of-consciousness in jail reveals the guilt that finally destroys her. The novel ends not in defeat but in continuity: Gloria and Claire form an unlikely friendship, Lara marries Ciaran, and Jaslyn lies quietly beside the dying Claire, carrying forward the lives of everyone who came before her.