A nurse cleaned the gravy from my face and scalp while another treated the burns.
They were painful but, thankfully, not the worst injury I had suffered.
The bigger danger was inside me.
Hannah’s heart rate dipped twice during the first hour.
Each time, half a dozen people appeared around my bed.
I stared at the monitor as if I could keep her alive through concentration alone.
Dad stayed beside me.
Mom did not come.
Neither did Alexis.
My husband was still overseas, and the hospital helped me contact his command.
Because of the time difference and the circumstances, hours passed before I finally heard his voice.
“I’m here,” he said through a crackling connection.
That was all it took.
I cried harder than I had since the fall.
I told him what happened in fragments.
My sister.
The gravy.
The stairs.
The blood.
The silence from everyone who had watched.
For several seconds, he said nothing.
Then he asked, “Is Hannah alive?”
“Yes.”
“Are you safe now?”
I looked around the hospital room.
“Yes.”
His voice changed.
“Then everything else can wait.”
It didn’t wait long.
That evening, a police officer came to my room.
Dad had called them from the house after the ambulance left.
Mom was furious.
I knew because she sent me six messages before I finally turned off my phone.
The first said Dad was “overreacting.”
The second said Alexis “never meant for me to fall.”
The third asked whether I really wanted to “destroy my sister’s future over one emotional mistake.”
By the sixth, Mom was blaming me for entering the party at all.
Dad read the messages over my shoulder.
He didn’t say anything for a long moment.
Then he asked, “Do you want me to save these?”
I nodded.
That was the beginning of the proof.
The officer asked me to describe the incident from the moment I entered the house.
I told him everything.
When I reached the part where Mom called me dramatic while I was bleeding, my voice cracked.
Dad looked down at his hands.
The officer remained calm.
“Do you know whether anyone recorded the incident?”
“I saw phones,” I said.
Dad nodded.
“Several guests admitted they had videos.”
What none of us knew yet was how much they had captured.
The next morning, Megan came to the hospital.
I almost refused to see her.
She had laughed when I arrived.
Maybe not as loudly as the woman in red, but she had stood there.
