"She does not."

If there were a larger understatement, Glen could not bring it readily to mind. To describe his wife as afraid of fire was to do her a disservice; there were very few things that genuinely inspired fear in her, and fire was not one of them. It was not wariness that drove her to shuffle just that little bit further away on the sofa when the hearth was alight, that made her favour the perch most distant from the camp fire, that made her cling to Glen just that little bit closer whenever the flames cracked away. It was not even the fire that she feared: it was the memories it conjured, of a life she'd left behind and desperately wanted to forget, but that haunted her every where that she went.

They had spoken of it many times before, Glen's guilt over inadvertently inflicting such things upon her usually serving as the trigger. Every time, Sandra assured him that he should not stop, should not change, should not try to spare her from her "fear". She wanted to face it, the same way she faced everything else; but she'd made him promise that he'd never let her face it alone, and he didn't intend to.

He let out a half sigh, his expression falling into a saddened frown. "It isn't my story to share," he admitted, "But there are things about fire that bring back memories, painful memories, that your mother doesn't want to contend with."

He placed a hand gently on Kara's shoulder; forced her and himself to look each other in the eye. "That's why she's upset, you know," he continued. "She only seems angry because she's trying to hide it. The fact that you're breaking rules, causing damage, doing things she's asked you not to: that doesn't mean anything next to the fact that you're playing with fire, something that causes her so much discomfort. Seeing you be so reckless with it, so nonchalant; it doesn't just upset her, it hurts."

His hand strayed to her cheek. "That's why you need to stop, Kara. Not because of rules. Not because of me. You have to stop so we can help your mother fight those bad memories away."