“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.

There was a smaller message under my name in an entirely different script.

I recognised that handwriting, too, immediately.

It was in my own hand.

CHAPTER 3

I looked at the paper, my hands shaking, the photograph quivering in them.

“That’s my handwriting,” I whispered, scarcely able to speak.

Dad did not take the photo away.

His eyes were fixed on me.