“—They’re calling for help. They’ll be here shortly. Don’t go anywhere, you can explain what happened, alright?”

That seemed to get through to her. She nodded again, retreating to her car, apparently to sit in the front seat. Good. That was handled.

Until she stopped at the door, turned around, and addressed the old man and the crowd, “I’m really goddamn sorry I broke your thing.”

The grieving man rose to his feet, stepping forward at the same time. He pulled away from the supporting hands of the people around him, his face contorting.

I stepped in his way, my arm out. He pushed forward, and I caught him in a half-hug with one arm, stopping him. He reached out and tried to push me aside, and I caught his arm.

He was a guy, but he was an elderly guy. It wasn’t much of a contest. The moment he met resistance, he sagged, and I did what I could to keep him from outright collapsing as he slowly sank to his knees again, sobbing openly.

I took the opportunity to turn him a fraction so he wouldn’t be looking at the girl or the pillar as he knelt there.

In the background, that girl seemed to flounder in shock, useless, not sure what to do with herself in the face of this moment of violent grief. She looked at me, but I didn’t want to say anything that might agitate the man I was dealing with. She looked to the crowd, and she saw only angry stares.

I wasn’t sure what she’d seen, if it was a motion from someone, a particular emotion on a particular face, but she found the reason to get moving again, getting into the car, slamming the door behind her. The man I was holding jumped at the sound.

The man stopped resisting altogether. It had been a fast enough change in attitude that I had to wonder at what he would have done if I hadn’t intervened. Shouted in her face? Grabbed her? Would he have lashed out and struck the girl? If he would’ve gone so far as to use violence, would it have been relentless, requiring people to pull him off, or would he have stopped the moment he was interrupted?

I gradually relaxed my hold on him.

The crowd, too, seemed to realize that the situation had mostly de-escalated. The girl was in her car, the old man wasn’t an apparent danger to himself or others so long as I was here. That was enough for the assembled group to start breaking up.

I stepped back, hands partially raised in case he started forward again, and to enable me to act if he seemed like he might fall. I couldn’t just say the pillar would get fixed, or that things would be okay. The old man hadn’t shed tears for the pillar.