“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.

Everyone else had spoken to me as though I were made of fragile glass, but Gabriel took the facts as realities to be faced head on.

I glanced down at the court document lying on my tray table.

“What awful things did they write about me in there?I said.

“They say you are emotionally unstable, physically unfit, financially irresponsible, and prone to child neglect,” Gabriel read from the filing, verbatim.

I looked at him, eyes blazing with pure fury.

“I work four days a week at the medical clinic, I pick up Maya every single day and I’ve never missed one single school event,” I protested loudly.

“I know your record well,” Gabriel said softly.