“Come get your worthless daughter and take her back,” my mother-in-law shouted my father as I lay broken at the bottom of the stairs after my husband shoved me down. “Your family will answer for it if she has even a scratch,” was the sole warning Dad offered her. They had no notion who my father really was, so they made fun of him.

“Why would I put a message in my own house?

“I mumbled.

“Because you already stopped trusting the people in that house,” Gabriel said flatly.

And that knowledge took root in my heart with gentle assurance.

I had fought so hard to convince myself that my marriage was normal.

But my instincts had picked up on the danger long before my conscious mind was ready to face it.

Dad came back into the room and took out his phone.

Dad said, “I’ll call the lead investigator right now.