It was to be a carefully choreographed farewell, an attempt to recover some grace and climb out of the political quicksand.

But Adam Giambrone’s City Hall office had armed him with only one page of a two-page speech, say two sources close to his campaign.

So with the eyes of the city upon him, he realized a page was missing. Suddenly, he said “Thank you,” spun on his heels, and charged out a door and down a staircase surrounded by a phalanx of city staff and security.

“He only had the first page, the second page was still in the printer,” in his City Hall office, said a campaign source who spoke on condition of anonymity.

“At this very dramatic and stressful moment, with this speech he had worked so hard on, the end of it is missing,” the source said, adding they were speaking out to make clear Giambrone wasn’t stopped short by a lack of will or nerve or character.

Earlier, Giambrone had written the speech and emailed it to City Hall to be printed. Later, staff redid it in a larger, easier-to-read 18-point type and re-sent it. But the bigger type bumped part of the speech onto a second page, which was apparently left in the printer, the source said.

It isn’t clear how much of the speech was missing – a reporter close enough to Giambrone to see the statement told colleagues he saw a TTC reference that comes after the part where Giambrone, the TTC chair, stopped reading.

In what was a carefully planned exit, security rushed Giambrone down and into a car waiting in the shipping and receiving area. Inside with the shell-shocked councillor, campaign officials debated what to do about the unfinished speech.

They decided Giambrone shouldn’t go back into the lion’s den. His aide, Kevin Beaulieau volunteered to take a bullet and, after trudging upstairs with full speech in hand, started to read. But even that didn’t go smoothly – Beaulieau at first said he would read it “in Adam’s voice” but quickly switched to the third-person.