“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.

Their head lawyer got up and made a slick speech about how I was an unstable, paranoid woman with severe psychological delusions who had fallen down her own stairs.

He created medical notes and said the family was just trying to protect sweet little Maya from an unfit mother.

Then it was Gabriel’s turn to speak.

Gabriel didn’t yell.

He wasn’t into emotional theatrics.

He merely stated cold, incontrovertible, damning facts.

He provided the official hospital trauma reports indicating that the physical impact marks on my back were totally incompatible with a simple fall.

He filed the sworn forensic statement of Laura Croft regarding the multi-million dollar signature forgery scheme.