“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.

Because you apparently signed as the primary guarantor on a huge line of credit’, Gabriel told him.

I shook my head violently into the pillow in hospital.

I never signed any corporate liability papers for his family!I said with conviction.

Gabriel put a clean photocopy of some legal contract right into my hands.

The page was loaded with dense financial jargon, and at the bottom a signature that looked remarkably like my own.

anybody would think I wrote it at first sight.

The handwriting was certainly wrong, as could be seen on closer inspection.