When my sister was trapped in her car, which was laying perpendicular on the freeway after flipping over several times, she could overhear people talking nearby.

“Is she alive in there?” someone asked.

She wanted to yell: Yes! I’m alive, and I can hear you!

Firefighters eventually cut her out of her crushed Lexus. First responders put her on a stretcher and took her to the nearest trauma center an hour away in Bryan, Texas. She was in pain, but conscious and answering the questions the EMS workers asked.

My sister, Rabeea, is an attorney and had been driving back from a deposition in Austin. She asked if she could call our mom to pick up her boys from preschool. They live in a suburb of Houston about two hours from the accident site, and her husband was out of town on a work trip.

In a reminder of how small the world can be, the EMS worker turned out to have attended high school with my sister nearly 20 years ago, though they hadn’t known one another in their huge suburban school. He was doing his best to calm her and take care of her when no one knew the extent of her injuries. He told her that her seat belt, which had cut into her shoulder and hip, had saved her life.

It’s terrifying to get a call that someone you love is being taken to the hospital. I think it’s worse when you are far away and can do nothing but imagine the worst and wait. Incredibly, Rabeea survived with just a few broken ribs, cuts and bruises.

When I heard she was OK, that’s when I cried. Tears of relief, mostly. Grateful that God had spared her life, that laws have made buckling up a habit for us, that firefighters, EMS workers and doctors had taken care of her, that her brain and body were intact, that my sweet nephews still had their mother.

My brother drove Rabeea back home once she was released from the hospital, and my mother went to stay the night with her. Doctors had given my sister a shot of morphine and a prescription for painkillers. My mom went to pick up her medicine from the pharmacy. It was dark and the street was poorly lit. She turned wide, and her car fell into a ditch.

I hadn’t been able to sleep anyway, so I was awake when my sisters started texting about my mom’s accident. Some nights you know you aren’t going to sleep at all.

A small group of bystanders gathered around my mom while she waited for a family member to come pick her up and a tow truck to move her car. She had her hair covered, like she always does in public. Five different people stopped to help her and stayed with her until my brother-in-law arrived. Thankfully, she hadn’t been injured.

She called me later to say how touched she was by the kindness of the strangers who waited with her.

“I was wearing my hijab, and it was midnight,” she said. “They were all so nice to me.”

It reaffirmed her belief in the goodness of people. Moments like that always do for me, too, but I felt a little sad about how grateful she sounded. Why wouldn’t people be nice to a grandma stuck in a ditch in the middle of the night regardless of whether she wore a headscarf? I didn’t say that aloud because even in my head I realized how naive it sounded.

Both accidents happened on my father’s birthday. I hadn’t called him while we were waiting for updates on my sister because his anxiety in such situations just exacerbates my own. When I did talk to him, we agreed to focus on what had been saved and let go of what had been lost.

The next day, in our sibling group chat, we texted about how crazy that day had been. One sister shared a quote from George Saunders’ commencement address in 2013 at Syracuse University as a reminder of how we should strive to treat one another: “What I regret most in my life are failures of kindness. Those moments when another human being was there, in front of me, suffering, and I responded ... sensibly. Reservedly. Mildly.”

Every day, I read news stories about people’s incivility or outright cruelty to other people. Sometimes these stories break my heart, and sometimes I’m not even surprised because it’s so common.

The first responders who helped my sisters and the bystanders who stood by my mother were unreserved in their kindness. They took care of people I love when they were alone and scared and hurt. I hope I am never too distracted, too self-involved or too sensible in the face of someone’s suffering.

Because it’s kindness that saves us.

Armaan Ahmad, 9, had some suspicions about the Tooth Fairy, so he set up a sting operation.

When he recently lost a tooth, he hid it under his pillow for a few days to see if she would make the usual currency exchange. (Going rate in the Ahmad household is $1 per tooth.) When he discovered the tooth still under his pillow after three days of silence, he casually mentioned to his dad that he had lost a tooth at school.

His father walked right into the trap.

“Put it under your pillow and see if anything happens,” Fahd Ahmad, a Washington University pediatric emergency room doctor, told him. Normally, his son excitedly shares his dollar after such a visit, but Armaan was quiet for the next few days.

He was mulling over his original hypothesis. Could it be true? There was only one logical conclusion.

A few days later, he confronted his mother, Emily, a pediatric nurse practitioner.

“I know the Tooth Fairy isn’t real because I hid the tooth for three days and no money came,” he told her. The cash showed up after he informed his dad.

He demanded the truth about other mystical figures, too. “Is Santa real?” he asked her. She told him she definitely believes in the spirit of Santa.

His investigation had been sparked by a report in his school newspaper months ago. A classmate had submitted a picture of the Tooth Fairy, left by the fairy herself, according to the friend’s mom. The paper ran the photo.

Armaan suspected fake news.

“I got confused,” he said. “I didn’t think the Tooth Fairy would leave a picture of herself.” So, he decided that when he lost his next tooth, he would devise a plan to find out the truth. He said he left the tooth under his pillow for a few days because he wanted to give the alleged fairy more time and collect more evidence to support his case.

The Ahmads, who live in the St. Louis suburbs and celebrate both Muslim and Christian holiday traditions, want to keep the magic alive for their younger sons, ages 4 and 1, for as long as possible. When Ahmad heard the account from his wife, he was amazed by his son’s ingenuity and posted a tweet on a personal Twitter account.

It quickly went viral, with more than 500,000 likes. Predictably, people started arguing -- about their parenting choices, the validity of mythical childhood creatures and even questioning Armaan’s experiment design. Some argued that parents shouldn’t lie to their children about these sorts of things, saying that it affected their trust when they discovered certain myths were untrue.

Neil deGrasse Tyson said in a late-night television interview in 2016 that he and his wife did not try to convince their daughter that the Tooth Fairy was real. He argued that children use their imagination in pretend play where it’s appropriate, and adults shouldn’t perpetuate an elaborate hoax on their kids in the name of fun.

Ahmad, who is Muslim, didn’t grow up with imaginary gift-giving figures. “I don’t know if there are any long-term effects” from such traditions, he said. “Some people said, ‘It made me turn away from God and made me an atheist. Some have said it reaffirmed their faith.” His wife’s childhood did include those mythical figures, and she says she wasn’t upset when she learned the truth. It was simply part of the fun and magic of the holidays.

She wants to carry on the same traditions for her younger sons, as well. But when Armaan asked her directly and demanded the truth, she said she didn’t want to lie directly.

Ahmad, shocked by the viral reaction to his story, has enjoyed responding to as many tweets as he can and debating the merits of magical creatures like the Tooth Fairy. He admits he’s a bit embarrassed by how easily he was taken by his son’s investigation.

“I’m a clinical researcher,” Ahmad said. He should have noticed the change in behavior and reaction to the missing tooth. But, he’s impressed that his son was able to design and run an experiment and sit on the results until he was ready to test his conclusion.

“As a dad, I’m pretty blown away that he did this entirely on his own.”

Emily said she has asked her son not to share his experiment results with his younger brothers, who haven’t even started to lose their teeth yet, or with any of his classmates.

“Don’t take away their fun,” she said. “I think it’s part of the magic of childhood.”

Armaan told his mother that he wants to run a test on Santa and the Easter bunny next.

Chris O’Leary started to sweat in church as he and his family moved up the line of parents and kids waiting for a turn at the confessional. When they got to the head of the line, O’Leary was crying and trying not to pass out.

O’Leary’s panic attack hit as his son made his first confession, in 2002.

He wasn’t sure why, but he wondered if it had something to do with hazy memories from his childhood confessions. Three years later, in 2005, his daughter made her first confession. He had another panic attack.

O’Leary had talked to church officials in 2002, after the New York Times broke a story involving sexual abuse allegations against Father Leroy Valentine. Valentine had been a priest at O’Leary’s childhood parish until the Archdiocese of St. Louis began moving the priest around. The story revealed that in the late 1990s, the archdiocese had settled with three brothers who had accused Valentine of sexual abuse, paying them $20,000 each.

The Times story unsettled O’Leary; he wasn’t sure if his vague, uncomfortable memories of confession with Valentine meant something inappropriate had also happened to him. When he spoke to then-Bishop Timothy Dolan, the bishop reassured him that he was misreading the situations from decades ago.

O’Leary also sought clarity outside the church. “Are you sure this wasn’t a thing?” he asked a psychologist. She also told him he was misinterpreting his memories.

So O’Leary buried them.

Then, his life started falling apart.

His panic attacks got worse. He couldn’t concentrate at work, and lost his job as a process improvement analyst where he made $90,000 a year. He got diagnosed with ADHD and then Asperger’s. He withdrew from his marriage of 16 years, which ended in divorce.

“By 2011, I had lost everything,” O’Leary said. He had also begun to accept that something bad had happened to him during his years at Immacolata Catholic Church in Richmond Heights, Missouri. Something happened during face-to-face confession with Valentine when he was in grade school.

“My head would end up in his crotch,” O’Leary said.

He went back to the archdiocese in 2011, met with an investigatory review team and told them what he had remembered. Two months later, he says, Deacon Phil Hengen told him Valentine denied the allegations.

Then in 2013, the church permanently removed Valentine from the ministry, saying in a statement that a recent allegation of an incident in the 1970s was credible. When O’Leary read the reports about Valentine’s removal in the local paper, he had a mental breakdown.

“That absolutely destroyed me,” he said. For so long, he had questioned his own reality and sanity. He didn’t trust psychologists anymore. He didn’t have any faith left in the church. He had already lost his job and family. And he had finally remembered the worst thing of all: That day in the summer between sixth and seventh grades, where he had always had a blank spot in his memory, had come back to him.

“I’m at the door of the rectory. The west door. Trying to get out. My hand is on the handle of the storm door. On the left side of the door. It’s all I can see as I fumble with it, desperate to get outside,” he recently wrote, in a blog post describing being raped that day.

In October of 2015, he filed a lawsuit against the archdiocese. It was settled two years later, and he received $9,000 of a $15,000 settlement after lawyers’ fees. When asked to comment on O’Leary’s account, archdiocese spokesman Gabe Jones said in an email, “The archdiocese’s record of Mr. O’Leary’s allegations are significantly different; however, due to a court order as well as our own ethical obligation, we are not at liberty to discuss Mr. O’Leary’s case.” Jones also said the information O’Leary shared initially changed multiple times by the time he broke off communication with the archdiocese’s Office of Child and Youth Protection.

The settlement, which O’Leary says he accepted under pressure of a statute of limitations that would have negatively affected his case, has not healed any of O’Leary’s wounds. The money mostly went to medical bills and other debts.

O’Leary, now 50 and living in Webster Groves, Missouri, struggles to leave his house and makes a living selling e-books and DVDs about baseball pitching and hitting techniques. In addition to ADHD and Asperger’s, he has been diagnosed with depression, anxiety, OCD and complex PTSD, but he hasn’t been to a therapist in years because he says the church destroyed his trust in them.

He decided to talk publicly about his case because he doesn’t believe the church is sincere about helping sexual abuse survivors. He wants to warn other parents. He’s published a detailed account and timeline on his website.

“Eventually, I realized the archdiocese didn’t care about me or what happened to me,” he said.

It’s a ghost that has haunted him the past 16 years, ever since he first spoke to a church official. Perhaps he holds out hope that someone in the church might acknowledge how much he continues to suffer -- not just from four years of intermittent abuse, but also from 16 years of not being believed.

He still considers himself a Catholic.

But he doesn’t believe he will ever be able to step foot in a church again.