When she became pregnant, the promises arrived — an apartment, medical care, a future.

And then the regional presidency moved from possibility to probability, and every promise inverted into its opposite.

The apartment became a threat.

The future became a demand that she disappear.

I am not going to set down here everything she described, because it is hers and not mine, and because the details belong in a sworn statement and not in a story.

What matters is the shape of it, and the shape was unmistakable to me because I had seen it a dozen times in a dozen houses: the isolation built slowly and on purpose, the dependence engineered and then exploited, the power of an employer over someone whose very right to remain in the country he held like a leash.