“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.

My husband tapping on my car window, holding his phone screen up to show me his mum sitting on the edge of Maya’s bed, holding a pair of heavy scissors.

“If you go to the police, my mother will see to it that Maya has a horrible accident tonight,” my husband had whispered smoothly through the cracked window.

I jumped out of the car immediately, utterly defeated, shaking with sheer terror.

“I remembered,” I said, “him taking the blue file folder out of my back seat.

It was like fire.

“Yes,” Laura said.