“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.

I looked at Gabriel, my eyes opening.

“My husband said I already signed the liability forms,” I whispered back.

Gabriel’s tone was like a razor blade.

“You really signed something in that office on the fourteenth of October?”

“I don’t remember signing a single page,” I said truthfully.

“Remember when you left their building?” Dad asked.

“Right,” I remembered.

My husband rode home with me in the passenger seat of my car.