“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.

‘He was with the police officers as they took pictures of the doorway.’

“Why was he in my house?” I insisted.

“I told him to go over with the officers when they went to pick up Maya’s clothes,” Dad told him.

I glanced at my father.

“You went into the house yourself?”

I went over but I stayed outside on the pavement while the officers worked’, Dad reassured me.

Was my husband in the house?”” I said quietly.

Dad replied, “Not with the police in the house.