“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 spent over twenty years as Chief of Special Prosecutions for Organised Financial Crimes supervising federal task forces and testifying before Congress.

“You said you always filled out basic compliance forms,” I said.

“I told you I work for the Department of Justice, which was technically true,” Dad said.

“That’s a big difference,” I whispered.

There was a long silence in the hospital ward between us.

As a kid I thought my dad had a boring job sorting paper files in a quiet office.

I never asked why retired judges sent him holiday cards, or why strange men called him Counsellor.