I (F25) have been with my fiance (M34) for three months. Everything’s been great… except for his mother (F804). She has never had a nice word to say about me. She’s convinced that I’m a gold digger, even though when we met I was a successful heart surgeon and he was unemployed and lived in a pigsty where the pigs gave him a discount on the rent because the straw was prickly.

Fast forward to this week, and his mother offers to take my daughter (F8) out to the zoo. I wasn’t sure about this, but my fiancé convinced me that it would be a good thing for the two of them to bond. She came back four hours later, WITHOUT my daughter, but WITH an elderly sausage dog (F12). At first, she refused to admit that anything was wrong, saying that my daughter had always looked like that and that maybe if I fed her better she wouldn’t be so small. Eventually, though, she admitted that she’d swapped my daughter for the dog, as she believed that the dog was “more suitable for our station in life.” I instantly ran out to look for her.

Eventually, I came across a confused-looking family trying to walk my daughter on a lead. I apologised for the confusion, gave them their dog back, and took my daughter home. She’d developed an irresistible urge to gnaw on any bones she found, but was otherwise unharmed.

Since then, my fiancé has been giving me the silent treatment. He says that I was out of line haranguing his mother like that, and he expected her to be respected in his house: I pointed out that it’s MY house, and he still sleeps at the pigsty three nights a week because he wants to keep his options open. He said to stop changing the subject.

One thing I should probably mention is that he was originally the fiancé of my sister (F16) who spontaneously combusted last July. We bonded through our grief, and I feel he may still be processing some of it. Should I apologise, or give him some space?