Chapter 1
The smell woke me before the heat did.
It slid beneath my bedroom door sometime after midnight, sharp and chemical, nothing like the comforting wood smoke from the fireplace Ruth and I used every winter. This smell had teeth. It coated my tongue, tightened my throat, and made every instinct in my seventy-two-year-old body scream that something was terribly wrong.
I sat up and pressed my bare feet against the floorboards.
They were hot.
“Vanessa!” I shouted. “Grant! Wake up! The house is on fire!”
For one second, the only answer was the crackle of burning wood somewhere below me. Then my daughter’s voice tore through the hallway.
“Baxter! Where’s Baxter?”
She was calling for her dog.
I opened my bedroom door, and a wall of smoke struck me across the face. Orange light pulsed at the far end of the upstairs corridor. Flames climbed the banister, twisting around the polished oak Ruth had chosen when we renovated the house thirty years earlier.
Vanessa rushed from the guest room wearing a silk robe, her hair loose around her face. She did not look at me.
“Dad, move!”
“We need to use the back stairs,” I said. “The front staircase is already burning.”
“Baxter is downstairs!”
She tried to push past me. I caught her arm.
“Forget the dog. We have seconds.”
She stared at my hand as though I had insulted her.
Then Grant shouted from downstairs.
“The filing cabinet! Vanessa, get the contracts out of the office!”
I could barely believe what I was hearing.
“The house is burning,” I yelled. “Leave the paperwork!”
Grant appeared at the bottom of the stairs, one sleeve pulled over his mouth. Behind him, flames crawled across the ceiling of my home office.
“We need those records,” he shouted. “They’re worth more than this house!”
Vanessa jerked her arm from my grip.
“Get out of my way!”
She shoved me with both hands.
My bad knee folded instantly. I stumbled sideways into the hotter end of the hallway, striking the wall with my shoulder. At that exact moment, the ceiling above Ruth’s old sewing room cracked with a sound like a rifle shot.
A burning support beam came down across my left leg.
The pain erased the room.
I hit the floor, my cheek against wood hot enough to blister skin. Smoke rolled over me in thick black waves. I clawed at the beam, but it did not move.
“Vanessa!”
She stopped at the top of the stairs.
For a heartbeat, we looked directly at each other.
I saw fear in her face, but it was not fear for me. It was the frantic calculation of someone deciding what she could still save.
“Please,” I said. “I can’t move.”
May you like
Baxter barked from downstairs.
Vanessa turned away.
