“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.

“They’ll paint you as a lonely woman whose every decision is controlled by her father,” Gabriel explained.

“They want the court to believe they are the only stable environment Maya can have.

My blood ran cold when I saw these absurd falsehoods in official court documents.

Dad leaned over, looked me in the eye.

“Rachel, before we get into our legal strategy, I have to tell you the whole truth about my past,” Dad said gravely.

I just looked back, waiting for an explanation.

“I wasn’t just a low-level department worker,” Dad said softly.