I know what one looks like when it has been fastened by somebody alone in a room, and I know what a fractured vertebra does to a person’s face, and I know the specific sound a person makes when they have been on the floor long enough to be frightened.

She had been down about twenty minutes.

She had not fallen from a great height and she had not hit her head.

What had happened was that she had taken the brace off at the end of a nineteen-hour day, which you are not supposed to do standing, and her left leg had gone, and she had come down on her hip, and once she was on the floor without the brace she could not get the leverage to get back up and could not get the brace refastened lying on her side.

And she had not called anybody, for twenty minutes, because there was a phone eleven feet away on the desk.