“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.

Neither man answered me immediately.

That’s a big possibility,” Gabriel finally suggested.

“What is the alternative?“I insisted upon knowing.

“They might be trying to get something of value through you,” Gabriel said.

That sounded completely ridiculous until I remembered a weird question my husband asked me the nite before he shoved me.

“Where’d you put the white envelope?He’d asked me, totally out of the blue.

I’d been standing in the kitchen going through our daily mail, and he’d walked up behind me with a serious look in his eyes.