On the video Mark interrupted to clarify what she meant by double shift. The translation came through: sixteen hours a day, six days a week. This was for a long time.

Then one day last year an airplane came out of the sky, and it was the fancy lady again. Peou had not seen her since that first day in Kampot, and she was very excited and pushed to the front of the crowd to get a close look. The fancy lady looked much older than she had before. Peou thought she must have been ill, and maybe that was why she hadn’t been to visit sooner.

The fancy lady stood on a platform with a microphone and told them—in English, while three different interpreters translated for the workers—that she had some unhappy news but also some very happy news for them. The unhappy news was that this factory would be closing. The happy news was that she’d found new jobs for all of them. Excellent work, far from here. It meant that some families would have to be separated—there was different work for the men and the women and the children—but the children weren’t so very young, and it was only temporary, and they would all be so much better off when they were reunited. And here was the most exciting part: airplanes would come to fly them to their new jobs.

Peou had never been on an airplane in her life, and she was very excited as she ran to her room and packed her few belongings. Then the workers assembled at the edge of the airstrip and were given different-colored cards to tell them which plane to get on. Some of the mothers cried when their children got different cards, but the boss men took them inside and explained things to them again, and they came back with their faces down and hugged their children goodbye and waited with their own groups.

Peou was lucky. She got to sit next to one of the tiny oval windows, and she pressed her face against it as the airplane skimmed the top of the teak trees until it rose high above the clouds. When the clouds parted, she saw that they were over the sea, but no one knew which one it was.

No one knew where they landed, either. It was an airstrip, but there were no buildings, not even a hangar, as there was back in Kampot. There were two big trucks waiting in black clouds of diesel smoke, and there were men waiting at the bottom of the airplane stairs when they came down, and they shouted and pushed and said, Get on, hurry up, and the women started to cry as they were herded into the trailers. Peou cried, too. She’d heard the stories, and now she realized this would be her story, too.

Mark stopped the video. “You know how it goes from here.”

I nodded.

He stood up and thrust his hands in his pockets and paced around the table to the French doors and gazed out into the night garden. “It’s CDMI. Obviously. The factory closed, and the traffickers swooped in and sold the workers into slavery, and if I could only prove that management had knowledge that this might happen—”