“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.

Dad and Gabriel stayed utterly silent and I spoke.

“She wasn’t a complete stranger,” I corrected myself.

“I’d seen her a few times at their corporate office when I would drop lunch off for my husband.

“What was she like?”’What do you reckon?’ said Gabriel, taking out his notepad.

She was in her late thirties, donned in a grey professional coat,” I explained clearly.

“She had a small scar just above her left eye.”

Gabriel wrote down these physical characteristics hurriedly.