The call came at 9:17 on a rainy Friday night.

My father, Richard, said there had been an accident outside Springfield, Missouri. His voice sounded strangely calm.

“Evan’s hurt,” he told me. “But don’t panic.”

Evan was my sixteen-year-old son.

I was already grabbing my keys.

“What happened?”

There was a pause.

Then my father said, “Your sister was driving.”

My stomach dropped.

My younger sister, Melissa, had lost her license six months earlier after a DUI. She wasn’t supposed to be driving.

I headed toward County Road 14 while calling 911. Dispatch said no crash had been reported.

That made no sense.

When I arrived twenty minutes later, my parents’ SUV sat crooked beside a drainage ditch. The front passenger side was destroyed.

Evan lay on the wet grass.

Blood covered one side of his face.

He was barely conscious.

“Dad,” he whispered when he saw me.

I dropped beside him.

His breathing sounded wrong.

My mother, Diane, stood near the SUV with Melissa.

Neither was helping him.

“What the hell are you doing?” I shouted.

Mom folded her arms.

“Lower your voice.”

“Why didn’t you call an ambulance?”

Melissa started crying.

Dad approached me. “We needed time to figure this out.”

I stared at him.

“Figure what out?”

Mom answered.

“If the police come now, Melissa goes to jail.”

I looked at my son bleeding in the rain.

Then at her.

“And that matters more than Evan?”

Mom gave a short, bitter laugh.