“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 remembered with terrifying distinctness that they had given me heavy sedatives that nite.

“My mother-in-law made me drink tea with sleeping pills, said I was totally hysterical.”

Dad’s eyes burnt with a black, dangerous rage I’d never seen before in my life.

“They drugged my daughter,” Dad said in a low, deadly whisper.

“They kept her sedated for two days,” Laura said sadly.

“They said she had a mental breakdown and dreamed the whole thing up.”

The fog of uncertainty that had hung around my mind for months evaporated completely, leaving me with a perfectly clear reality.