Mom stepped closer.
“You don’t understand what this will do to your sister.”
I looked down at Evan.
His eyes were closing.
Then I noticed something beside the crushed passenger door.
A phone.
Evan’s phone.
The screen was cracked, but it was still recording.
A red timer kept counting.
My mother followed my gaze.
Her expression changed instantly.
She understood.
Everything she had just said was recorded.
And through the rain, blue lights appeared in the distance.
The first ambulance arrived less than three minutes later.
Two paramedics rushed to Evan while a sheriff’s deputy ordered everyone else away from the SUV.
I stayed beside my son until a paramedic gently pushed me back.
“We need room, sir.”
Evan had a fractured collarbone, two broken ribs, a deep cut above his ear, and signs of internal bleeding. The paramedics stabilized his neck and loaded him onto a stretcher.
I rode with him in the ambulance.
Behind us, I saw Melissa talking to Deputy Harris with my father close beside her.
Mom stared at Evan’s phone in my hand.
She looked terrified.
At the hospital, doctors rushed Evan into surgery.
A trauma surgeon told me his spleen had ruptured.
Another thirty minutes without treatment, he said, could have changed everything.
I sat alone in the waiting room, covered in my son’s blood.
