Forty feet on a carpeted corridor without the brace after two hours sitting.

The left leg went.

She came down on her right side against a wall.

There was a witness.

A hotel employee named Aurelio Pastrana, who was twenty-three and was on the floor restocking a housekeeping cart, and who was there within about four seconds, before I was.

I came out at the noise.

And what I did in the following ninety seconds is the thing I have to account for and it is the reason this is not a story about a good man in a bad situation.

I knelt down.