And once the investigation became public, two women who had kept house for him before Catalina came forward, having read that someone was finally asking.

Both described the same architecture: the threats, the withheld wages, the advances that could not be refused without risking everything.

Catalina had not been an aberration.

She had been the third floor of a building he had been quietly constructing for years, and now every tenant was testifying.

The two earlier women were the part that broke something open in me.

When Catalina first told me her story, I had understood it as a monstrous thing that had happened to one person, and my job as getting justice for that one person.