“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.

Dad looked straight at me, a serious look on his face.

“Rachel, can you recall seeing a blue ledger book?” Dad asked softly.

I closed my eyes and searched my memories, going back years to visits at my in-laws’ house.

They had a great study on the second floor, the room lined with dark mahogany shelves and heavy velvet drapes.

A brass lamp stood on the enormous desk of my father-in-law, and the wooden drawers were always locked fast.

A blue ledger book.