Hard to tell flying from falling

The expression “hard to tell the difference between flying and falling” names a perilous uncertainty: movement that feels like progress may also be a continuation toward disaster. Nadia offers it as her belief about how people behave when caught in chaos. The phrase links her work as a psychologist to Zara’s concealed history, and returns in the hostage crisis as a prompt for Zara to reach out rather than remain a witness.

The phrase in Nadia’s practice

Nadia’s formulation comes during a conversation with Zara in therapy. Zara asks whether Nadia has learned theories about why people behave as they do; Nadia answers that she has learned hundreds, then describes the one she believes. People in a catastrophic situation, she explains, may not retreat. They may accelerate, trusting ever more confidently that some unlikely solution will save them. To observers, the crash can seem inevitable, while the person approaching it still expects to pass through unharmed. Nadia’s image of flying and falling condenses that mismatch between felt direction and actual risk.

The expression is not presented as a clinical label or a guarantee that Nadia can predict what someone will do. It is a way of describing a human pattern she has encountered, offered in conversation rather than as a diagnosis of Zara. Its force lies in the uncertainty: the same forward motion can be experienced as escape or mistaken for it, and an apparent solution can keep a person moving deeper into danger.

From therapy to the hostage crisis

Zara usually tries to keep thoughts at bay. During the hostage crisis, however, she sees the bank robber alone with the pistol, and Nadia’s words return to her. In the apartment hall, Zara takes hold of the pistol and tells the bank robber, “Don’t do anything silly.” The scene gives the earlier image an immediate consequence: instead of watching another person move toward a potentially irreversible act, Zara intervenes with a brief appeal. The phrase does not make the danger disappear, but it helps connect Zara’s past experience to an action in the present.

Nadia’s insight also belongs to the history that brought the two women together. After The man on the bridge died, Nadia could not know what she would have done had the boy not pulled her down. She repeatedly tried to understand the difference between herself and him; that unresolved question shaped her choice to become a psychologist. She later worked with people who felt close to an edge, meeting them as someone who understood that state from experience. Her account of people continuing into chaos is therefore tied to a life built around recognizing distress and helping others find a way down.

Zara’s delayed understanding

Zara had been present on The bridge when Nadia climbed onto the railing and Jack rescued her. Hidden in the darkness, Zara did not move; she remained until the ambulance took Nadia to hospital. She found Nadia’s wallet and identification, then kept the knowledge of that night to herself. For ten years, she followed Nadia’s life, education, and early career from a distance, and watched The bridge from balconies of apartments for sale. She feared returning to the place and feared approaching Nadia, yet wanted to understand what distinguished Nadia from the man who had jumped. She carried a letter from him but did not open it.

At the end of that long silence, Zara lets the envelope slip from her hand in Nadia’s office. She wants Nadia to read the letter aloud and to stop her from jumping if the words bring her to that point, but at first she can manage only Nadia’s name. Nadia opens the ten-year-old handwritten note. The scene turns the expression’s uncertainty toward Zara herself: the woman who had watched and wondered about the difference between people now needs another person to witness what she has carried. Nadia’s phrase makes that difficulty speakable without reducing it to a simple distinction between a person who falls and one who flies.

A pattern of limited rescue

The expression sits within the novel’s wider emphasis on helping one person at a time. Jack remembers his mother’s lesson that people cannot change the world all at once: they help when they get the chance and save those they can. Jack could not save his sister or the man on The bridge, but Nadia’s work and Zara’s intervention show other forms of response. The phrase does not promise that every crisis can be prevented; it describes why someone may fail to turn back even as others recognize the danger.

The story extends that principle into practical support. Nadia attends a summer camp for children who have lost a family member to suicide, where they can learn they are not alone and need not carry guilt and silence by themselves. Zara, after resigning from her job and giving away her fortune, makes a donation that will help the camps continue. Set beside the phrase, these acts offer neither a universal cure nor certainty about another person’s choices. They make help concrete: listening, speaking, intervening, and sustaining a place where people can share what otherwise remains difficult to say.