“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 whispered, “Thank you so much, Dad.”

Dad looked at my bruised face and I could see his jaw visibly tighten.

“I ought to have been at your house to-day,” he said with a heavy heart.

“You couldn’t have known he was going to do that,” I said quietly.

“I knew enough to tell you to leave that man months ago,” Dad said quietly.

In the last year, he had asked me three times to leave my husband.

He never shouted or abused my husband, he just said quietly to me that I was losing myself.