Acrid smoke assaulting her nostrils brought Dr. Sarah Gordon awake. Was the noise downstairs real, or was it a part of a dream? No matter. The smoke was real. Her house was on fire.

Her first impulse was to make sure Jenny was safe. But first, she needed to wake Harry. Sarah reached to her left across the king-size bed, but when her hand touched a bare pillow she realized her husband wasn’t there. He was dead. He’d been dead for eight months now. So had her daughter. Sarah was alone… in a burning house.

Or was she alone? Had she really heard a noise? Was someone down there, waiting for her to come down those stairs? She couldn’t stay up here and burn to death, though. What should she do? Rules and admonitions, read or heard long ago and almost forgotten, swirled through her mind. Sarah stopped and forced herself to think logically, just as she would when faced with a problem in the emergency room.

She threw on a robe, shoved her feet into slippers, grabbed her cell phone and in a few strides covered the distance to the door leading from her bedroom into the hall. Feel the door. If it’s hot, find some other way out.

Cautiously, she pressed her palm against the door…