I start to argue, but she holds up a hand.
My mom, who had every right to be annoyed, just tilted her head. “Do what?”
“Interesting,” he says, writing something in a tiny notebook he apparently brought for “session notes.” “So control is a theme on both sides.”
But Max couldn’t leave it alone. While my mom went to fill the water bottles, he took it upon himself to “improve” the fire. He dismantled the teepee, stacked the burning logs into a wobbly cabin shape, and then—because the flames were now too low—doused the whole thing with a third of a bottle of lighter fluid he had smuggled in his pack.