“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.

My father-in-law, Harold Sutter, was seated with his back to the door.

He was wearing a dark navy jumper and reading glasses.

On the desk was a telephone, its cord snaking around a thick stack of papers.

He wasn’t alone in that office.

Sex: Female.

Not my mother in law.

It was a woman younger than he, with reddish auburn hair pulled back in a loose clip.

Suddenly I said, “There was a stranger in the room with him.”