I will not walk through the details of that night the way the evidence did, because the details are not the point and never were, and because my sister was seventeen years old and drunk and frightened, which does not excuse what she did but does, I have come to believe, help explain it.

It is enough to say what the evidence established, plainly, and what Jessica, in the end, confirmed with her own mouth.

She had been drinking.

She had taken our father’s car again, after he had forbidden it, and hit the gate coming in, and I had told her that this time I was going to call the police.

And she had done something, in her drunken panic, to frighten me into silence, something reckless and stupid and terrible, involving our father’s lighter and a container from the garage, that she swore she never imagined would do what it did.

“I didn’t know it would spread!” The words burst out of her before she could stop them, there in the ballroom, in front of everyone.