i think my dad burned down our house (on purpose)

and that's on my absentee alcoholic father simply doing the most to avoid doing anything at all.

Mar 20, 2026

We spent all spring (2011) househunting, my younger sister, my stepmom (D), and I. We toured house after house, my sister and I reinventing our future selves with each and every one.

I wouldn’t say either of us had the happiest of childhoods, so there was something hopeful in househunting. Exploring new rooms, new nooks and crannies with which to fantasize that possibly, in this house or that one, our parents might be new too.

The evil stepmother in Cinderella had nothing on D. As her “step” child, I quite literally spent summers polishing her furniture, copying lines of text from books for hours to ‘correct’ my shoddy handwriting, playing mind games with her over what food I could eat if I was hungry (sometimes all she’d offer was a single stick of gum).

For D, it was always about control. And I wasn’t her only victim.

Enter, Dad. Now, Dad is about as non-confrontational as a person can be. Workaholic, alcoholic, and though he exclusively worked from our home, he still managed to be an altogether absentee parent.

Like many fathers, our basement was his sanctuary, his fortress of solitude. With a vodka tonic in hand, he could slip into his office, and the rest of the world – my sister and I included – would simply cease to be.

Now, given that my sister and I were too young at this point to be clued in on the nuanced relationship dynamics between Dad and D, for now, we have to make some educated guesses as to the catalyst for this move.

5 house showings… 10… 15…

On the umpteenth house tour, a frustrated D tells our realtor to just pick the most expensive house in the area for us to outright buy, sight unseen.

This always struck me as a curious request, seeing how in the 10+ years I’d known D, she only ever bought off-brand food and that scratchy one-ply toilet paper, shopped exclusively at Old Navy, and would charge me 25c every time I left my bedroom light on.

But, as any good realtor (paid on commission, of course) would do, a house was found the very next day, and we moved just as the school year came to a close.

What happened next is simply the events as I recall them, but stick around for the added color that, in the years since, has led me to the conclusion that the fire that ultimately burned down our new was no accident.

For two weeks in the summer of 2011, I went to sleepaway camp. A first for me, but in a familiar location where my mom’s side of the family would vacation every year.

I was away for a total of three weeks, maybe just a few weeks after the move.

In the third week, with camp over, I’m back with Mom at our rental in the area. She gets a call from Dad and hands me the phone.

“Hey, so, um, there was a fire.”

The story goes that lightning struck nearby, causing a faulty wire in one of the ovens to spark and ignite.

“Luckily, no one was home,” with D and my sister being out of town for the weekend –something they absolutely never did – “but I was at work” on a Saturday? “and it took the firefighters too long to reach me. Everything is gone.”

This is a logical point where you might be thinking: smoke detectors?

Well, according to Dad, the house was too new, and our permits hadn’t come in for the smoke detectors to be activated. (Do remember, I’m 13 and have no idea how the f these things work)

The house was minutes away from being nothing more than ashes and dust. Much to my father’s dismay, I assume, firefighters were able to save the structure just enough for the interior to be rebuilt.

At this point, maybe you’re following along just enough to be a tad suspicious, but not enough to think Dad could be behind such destruction.

Now comes the little spicy tidbits I’ve collected in the years since. (Trigger warning)

Important Context:

Dad had a horribly traumatic upbringing.
1. Think: his mother having an affair with his high school friend, who subsequently unalived himself and blamed her - sending her into an addiction spiral during which she blamed it all on Dad… seriously.
After that whole fiasco, he dropped out of Stanford and enlisted in the Navy to get back at her.
1. A move he then immediately regretted, and at that time, there were very few ways to get out of the Navy, but one of them was by being gay (*eye roll*), so naturally, he hopped into bed with his roommate and made a move that got him kicked right out.
My grandmother was a pet lover with dozens of pets from possums to parrots, and when he couldn’t get her back with the whole Navy scandal, he single-handedly killed all of her pets.
Dad cheated on my mom with D when I was still in the womb – via hundreds of truly delusional emails they exchanged when they were colleagues together back in the day.
1. Which he printed out and kept in a folder that he conveniently managed to SAVE FROM THE FIRE (yes, I found the smoke-covered folder years later in an anger-fueled snooping session)
Most notably, Dad has since revealed that back in 2011, it was either divorce (due to D’s affair with the neighbor) or move. Lmk how the latter is even a logical choice at this point, let alone the one you make.
Dad is a certified genius with a lifetime of regret and untapped potential. Unfortunately, he applied his intellect more to martyrdom than to ever confronting his trauma.

Like any true villain arc, there is a mountain of stories like this I never needed to know. But remember when I said Dad was the most non-confrontational person you could meet…

Making the extreme wrong choice is often, for my dad, the easiest choice.

Bonus Consideration: This year, I became a first-time homeowner, and let me tell you, no inspection will pass without working smoke detectors. Or likely miss such a glaring fault in an oven that had been used by the previous owners for years prior.

And, conveniently, D and my sister never had prior or have since been out of town for a weekend together.

For those wondering, I have a very complicated relationship with my dad. He is obviously not a moral person, nor was he a good father. We spent most of my early 20s estranged for good reason.

In recent years, however, his decades of alcoholism have deteriorated his health to the point where I made a choice to participate, however strained, in the time I have left with him. If only for my own healing journey.

Recently, I asked him whether he intentionally started the fire. To which he smiled coyly at me and said: “That’s good.”

- June

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