“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’re wrong about that.”

Suddenly I remembered how my mother-in-law had laughed out loud on the phone after Dad had warned her.

For the first time since tumbling down those stairs, I didn’t feel helpless anymore.

The family who was trying to erase me had just declared war on a single man who had made his career out of destroying powerful people who thought they were above the law.

And my father had already started to move.