Try a different story.” He stood so fast his chair went over backward.

“You think you’ve won?” he said, and there was something ugly and frightened underneath it now, the thing that had always been under the charm.

“Catalina will fold.

People like her always do.”

It was the truest thing he said in that room, and he did not know it. People like her always do. That was the entire theory of his life — the assumption that the powerless can always be counted on to stay powerless, that a frightened girl with no money and shaky documents will always, in the end, take the settlement and vanish.

He had built everything on it: the exploitation, the threats, the confidence with which he walked into my office expecting to win.