“What’s a little dove like you doing here?” he asked, his eyes not on her face.

“You pay later,” the clinic’s receptionist said with a knowing smile.

But Catalina had seen the math of the world. A secretary earned two hundred dollars a month. A narco’s girlfriend had a Jeep, a house with marble floors, and a photo on the cover of Aló magazine. The equation was brutal and simple.

That night, Albeiro backhanded her for talking to another man. The taste of blood was coppery and final. Catalina escaped not with a grand plan but with a bus ticket hidden in her shoe. She left the white purse, the cell phone, the push-up bras. She walked twelve kilometers to the highway, her chest aching where the silicone had settled wrong, a constant dull reminder of the price she had paid for a door that had turned out to be a wall.

But Albeiro bought her. He moved her out of the village into a beige apartment with a jacuzzi that never worked. He gave her a white purse with gold buckles. He gave her a cell phone that rang only with his voice, always asking where she was, who she was with, why she had taken five minutes longer than expected to buy milk.

One afternoon, she borrowed a push-up bra from Paola, stuffed it with toilet paper, and walked to the edge of the village where the black SUVs with tinted windows idled. A man named Albeiro, a thin, cruel-faced sicario with a gold front tooth, leaned against his truck.

“And with them, there is only what you carry.”

Albeiro laughed, but he kept watching. A week later, he sent her a gift: a voucher for a clinic in Bogotá. The procedure was called breast augmentation. Silicone. Four hundred cubic centimeters.