I walked two miles from the bus station, expecting balloons and a hot meal. Instead, the house was silent. Rebecca stood on the porch, bruised and trembling.
“Where’s Lena?” I asked. She pointed to the abandoned hog pen and locked the door behind her.
I ran. My twelve-year-old daughter was curled in the muck, shivering under a filthy sheet. “Mommy threw me out!” she screamed. Rage consumed me, but then I smelled it—gasoline.
Rebecca appeared at the kitchen window, clutching a fire extinguisher, terrified. Lena’s eyes were wild, fixed on the house, and in her pajamas pocket was my silver Zippo.
“Mommy locked the matches,” she said with a grin. “But she forgot the garage.”
Cold dread replaced my anger. Slowly, I took the Zippo from her and led her inside. We stripped off her soaked clothes and cleaned her, trembling, while Rebecca revealed the truth: Lena had a dangerous fascination with fire—a legacy of neglect and misunderstanding.
That night, we called Dr. Aris Thorne, a child psychologist. Over months of therapy, Lena began to channel her intensity into building model engines instead of destruction.
Two years later, Lena is fourteen, brilliant and focused. Our house is safe, the old hog pen replaced by a garden of wildflowers. The scars remain, but they are reminders of what we survived. Love, I realized, isn’t avoiding the fire—it’s walking through it together and rebuilding from the ashes.