My husband pushed me down the stairs, and as I lay shattered at the bottom, my mother-in-law called my father and said, “Come get your worthless daughter and take her back.” Dad gave her only one warning: “If she has so much as a scratch, your family will answer for it.” They laughed at him because they had absolutely no idea who my father truly was.

Healing, I was learning, was partly the work of making it mine again.

That evening, I received an email from a former neighbor named Meredith.

She had heard I was recovering and wanted to help.

We had barely spoken in two years, yet she remembered an incident at a barbecue when Martin grabbed my arm hard enough to make me drop a glass.

“I thought I was imagining how upset you looked,” she wrote.

“I wish I’d checked on you afterward.”