“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.

Nurse Marisol drew the fabric aside and out stepped a young woman in a bright yellow gift bag.

“You have a special visitor who has been cleared to see you,” Marisol announced, smiling warmly.

A small figure appeared behind the nurse.

Maya.

She wore her pyjamas, with her yellow raincoat over them, and a folded piece of bright construction paper in her small hands.

Her dark hair was in two messy braids, one of which was already coming undone at the end.

She paused at the side of the bed and gazed up at me with wide, anxious eyes.