Greg turned away from her, shielded his face, and hurled himself into the rising flames. She couldn’t hear the 911 operator over the roaring noise, but she heard Greg barreling up the stairs yelling to the children.

She yelled, “I love you!” but her words were swallowed up in the blaze. The searing heat scorched her blistered throat. Melanie clamped her mouth shut and turned her attention back to the phone. Was someone on the other end? She dropped to her hands and knees, cupped her fingers around the mouthpiece, and shouted her message as clearly as possible to the dispatcher she hoped was listening.

That’s when she heard the crash—the one that sounded like columns falling in the foyer. Melanie figured the staircase would be next.

The kids’ room was right above her. Melanie instinctively looked up to launch a prayer and saw a thick, rolling layer of smoke hugging the ceiling. She let out a long, piercing wail. A terrible thought tried to enter her mind. She forced it away.

Melanie screamed again—screamed for her girls, screamed for Greg, screamed even as hot air filled her mouth and lungs and tried to finish her off.

But Melanie had no intention of dying. Not here in the bedroom. Not without her family. Coughing, choking, she crawled steadily toward the doorway.

The theory that the air was better near the floor apparently didn’t apply to basement fires because thick, gray ropes of smoke were sifting upward through the floorboards. Melanie’s lungs ached in protest as the heat and flames stepped up the demand on her oxygen. Her pulse throbbed heavy in her neck. The hallway, a mere twelve feet away, had been rendered nearly impenetrable in the moments since Greg had left her. During that tiny window of time, the flames had more than doubled in height and intensity, and their all-consuming heat sucked so much oxygen from the air, she could barely maintain consciousness.

As she neared the doorway, a bedroom window imploded with a loud crash. Hot, broken glass slammed into her upper torso like a shotgun blast, pelting her face, neck, and shoulders with crystals of molten shrapnel. The impact knocked Melanie to her side. She shrieked in pain and instinctively started curling her body into a protective ball. The skin that had once covered her delicate face was gone, and the meat that remained broiled in the heat.

That would have done it for Melanie had she been fighting solely for her own life, but she was fighting for Greg and the twins, and she refused to let them down. Melanie shrieked again, this time in anger. She got to her hands and knees, made her way through the doorway, crawled to the base of the stairs, and looked up.