“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.

“Who put this warning on the front of this envelope?

“Laura,” Gabriel asked.

Tears fell down Laura’s cheeks as she said.

“Rachel wrote that message herself on October fourteenth, sitting in her car, right after she realised they had forged her signature.

I stared at the brass key lying on the table as the last pieces of my broken memory fell into place.

PART FOUR

Inside the medical bay there was absolute silence for several long seconds.

Laura’s words hung in the air, the quiet hum of the hospital monitors distant.