“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 call it an unfortunate accident,” I repeated sarcastically.

He never asked to see you once,” Gabriel added bluntly.

I nodded slowly and seriously.

It hurt, this total lack of care, but not because I wanted him back.

Now I felt no romantic affection for him.

It hurt because a small part of me had hoped that he had at least a smidgen of human decency.

Instead he was already building his legal case.

There was a soft tap on the curtain frame.