“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.

I closed my eyes and frantically scanned the last few months of my memory.

Nothing was coming up.

I remembered so many creepy moments.

My husband whispering on the phone in the hall, his mother’s sharp voice on speaker phone, his father asking me if I’d made progress on papers I didn’t understand, a blue leather ledger under a brass lamp.

But I didn’t remember writing that note.

I don’t remember putting that envelope there by the stairs.

Dad sat on the edge of my bed again.