I knew he would come to the stairwell, and he did. I saw him through the little window in the door, standing on the landing, looking down through the glass at the room full of cubicles, and I got up and went out to him without anyone looking up, because nobody ever looks up when I get up. The stairwell at Brecken is concrete and painted a pale industrial green and smells of dust and floor wax, and it echoes, so we spoke quietly. He was holding the index card.
"Hi," he said. Like that. Hi. As if we'd met at a barbecue.
"Hello."
"Etta." He said it carefully, trying it out. "I didn't know your name. All this time. I could have found out. I didn't want to." He looked at the card. "Is this true? That she — that she remembers?"
"I heard her say it. In the break room. She called the fire department, Derek. She's been calling around trying to find a woman who doesn't exist."
He closed his eyes. He was a big man, and he seemed, there on the landing, to get smaller, not all at once but by degrees, his shoulders coming in and his head going down, until he was leaning against the green cinderblock wall with one hand over his face.
"I didn't plan it," he said through his hand. "You have to believe that. I never planned any of it. When the reporter came — that first day, I was still at the hospital, in the waiting room, I'd followed the ambulance because I didn't know what else to do — she came up and said, are you the man who pulled her out, and I said, no, there was a woman, a woman got her out, I just got there after. I said that. I swear to God I said that. And she said, but you went in the water, and I looked down and my pants were wet to the shins and I said, yeah, I guess, and she said, that's incredible, and her cameraman was already rolling. And then they cut the part about the woman. Or they kept it as — what was it. A second motorist."