“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.

“Why didn’t you tell me about this before?“I whispered.

“Because I had no way of knowing if the book you saw was the one mentioned in an old file,” Dad reasoned.

“It must be the same book,” I said softly.

I imagined the dark office, the locked heavy drawers, the conversations that stopped dead the moment I walked into the room.

And it struck me that my father-in-law knew that I had seen the book on the desk that day.

“Have you handled the ledger?”” Gabriel enquired.