Sometimes I almost felt the same way. In Valhalla I slept warm and enjoyed hot showers and a full belly every day. I got to exercise in the gym for free. Thanks to Nina and our legal aid clinic, I was in no danger from the other inmates, and I had a pleasant cellie. We’d become constant companions over the past month. More than that. Friends. The first one I’d made in over five years. The only real complaint I had about my current situation was the confinement.

That didn’t bother Jingjing. She hadn’t been free in her outside life, either. And her only alternative, according to the DA, was an ICE detention center, then deportation. She declared she’d rather spend the rest of her life in Valhalla than go back to her village in Yunnan. She didn’t know whether her family was still there, nor did she care. They were the ones who’d sold her to the slavers in the first place.

Her only real complaint was boredom. Because she was in custody as a material witness and not as a pretrial detainee, she was excused from the work requirements imposed on the other inmates. Without a work assignment, and with me in the office most of the day, she didn’t know what to do with herself. There were three other victim workers housed in the Women’s Unit pursuant to the same material witness orders, and they were also excused from work, but Jingjing wanted nothing to do with them. “They Malay,” she sniffed. She ate with me, exercised with me, and sat at my elbow during evening consultations and even took notes. “Maybe I can go to job with you?” she’d suggested after the first week.

“You’d be bored there, too,” I told her. “Just watching a bunch of women work with numbers all day.”

“Maybe I help. I good with numbers.”

It turned out she was better than good. She was a whiz at double-entry bookkeeping. She was also good at scheduling, filing, and, if given a script to read from, telephone etiquette. Our supervisors raised skeptical eyebrows at first, but soon enough they were happy to bring in another desk for Jingjing.

“How’d you ever learn all this stuff?” I asked one night when we were alone in our cell. We often talked after lights-out as the clamor faded up and down the pod and the snow fell softly outside our window.

“Promise not tell?” Jingjing whispered from her top bunk.

“Of course I won’t tell.”

“’Cause could be big trouble if cops find out.”

“Tell you what,” I said. “Toss me down a Snickers.”

“Oo-kay.” Jingjing sounded skeptical, but a candy bar landed on my blanket.

“Now you’ve paid me a retainer, and I’m your lawyer, and you’re my client, and anything you tell me is privileged.”

“What this mean, privileged?”

“It means it’s a secret I can never tell anybody without your consent.”

“Oh. Good deal,” she said.

For the first several years of her captivity, she told me, she was strictly a sex worker, confined to a small room where she turned as many as twenty tricks a day. But gradually she was able to impress the bosses through her facility with numbers. She’d work out the day’s tally in her head and tell them her estimate, and it would be close enough to the actual take that the bosses decided to move her up front when none of them could be there to run the register. A guard was always stationed at the door, but he was muscle, not brains. So Jingjing was the one who greeted the johns as they came in, told them the menu of services and the fee for each, and took their money before directing them to a room. The bosses were pleased; she freed them up to do the important work of finding more girls for their operation. She seldom had to turn a trick again.