That night I was answering Daniel Vermeulen, father of three in Johannesburg, and Daniel had just written "you swear it's not a scam?", and I was writing the answer they had taught me on the first day, the answer that said "of course, the wallet verifications were already done this morning by the legal team, the documentation will reach you by email by 18:00 Johannesburg time, sincerely Sara".

It was two-fourteen at night and there were five other workstations in the room and three Romanians were sleeping on mats in a corner because it was their break shift, and I was drinking a Yakult that had been sitting there for eight hours warm, and the room stank of hot plastic and of the fried food Yi-jin had brought up from the seventh floor at nine in the evening, and Yi-jin was the shift boss and she was twenty-nine and she was from Henan province and spoke a northern Mandarin that always sounded shrill to me, and Mandarin I had learned on the job, because in Vietnam I spoke only Vietnamese and school French and tourist English, and Mandarin had been taught to me in three months by a woman from Phnom Penh whose name was Mai and whom I had not seen since.

I had arrived in that building ten months earlier. I was twenty-six years old. My father was a bricklayer in Bắc Giang. My mother sewed shirts at home. I had studied two years of administration in Hà Nội and then I had stopped because there was no money. I had found the Telegram post that was looking for girls for a "customer service in Cambodia" with "lodging included and a thousand dollars a month", and I had thought that a thousand dollars a month in Cambodia was two months of my father's salary, and I had said yes.

The trip had been Hà Nội-Phnom Penh-Manila and in Manila someone took my passport, and I said "excuse me" in English and they answered "zhànghào", which was the account number, and in that moment I understood that I had signed something that was not what I thought, and they took me by car to Angeles City and they made me go up to the sixth floor of the building, and they told me that my travel debt was five thousand dollars and that I would pay it back by working, and I said yes, because saying no in that room was not an option I had ever considered.

The fifth floor had bars welded to the windows. The sixth did not. In February a Vietnamese coworker from Hải Phòng had thrown herself from the sixth floor. Her name was Trang. She was twenty-two. The management had kept the sixth-floor windows shut for two weeks and then opened them again because the heat was unbreathable, and no one threw themselves anymore, because no one was new enough not to know what it meant to throw oneself from the sixth floor.

Daniel Vermeulen was forty-seven and had three children. He was on early retirement from a logistics company at the port of Durban. He had sold his grandmother's house two weeks earlier, he had told me, because he was moving into a smaller one, and with the difference he now had forty-eight thousand dollars more in his account, and he wanted to put them into an investment that returned eight per cent a month. Eight per cent a month was a figure no bank in the world offered, and I knew it, and Daniel maybe knew it too but did not want to know it.

I had written the answer. It said "of course, you can trust at one hundred per cent", and then the whole thing about the wallet and the legal team and the documentation, and my finger was on the SEND button, and in that moment I heard the steps in the corridor and Yi-jin shouting in northern Mandarin "BI! BI!", and then the first blow on the armored door of the floor.

I counted. I had eleven seconds before the door gave way, maybe. I deleted the entire message I had written. The text bar was empty. I wrote a single word. Run. I pressed SEND.

Then I did something they had told me on the first day never to do. I took a screenshot of the conversation. I opened it in the gallery. I wrote to Daniel, from my Sara account, I wrote: "I did not send. I am Linh, I am twenty-seven, tell the Vietnamese consulate in Manila I am on the sixth floor of the Diosdado building, Angeles City, Pampanga". I pressed SEND.

The door gave way on the third blow. The Romanians hid under the counter. Yi-jin disappeared through the back door. I did not hide. I put the phone on the counter with the screen facing up. The handcuffs were plastic, lavender-colored. They read me my rights in English and in Tagalog, a BI woman with a bulletproof vest two sizes too big, and then they asked me what my name was, and I said Lê Thị Linh, and the woman nodded, and wrote my name on a sheet.

When I came out of the room, the phone was still on the counter. The screen showed Daniel's conversation. The three blue dots of his reply were pulsing at the bottom of the chat. They pulsed. They pulsed. Then they pulsed no longer.