“Run,” Ximena whispered, gripping her wrist. “Run before the first bruise. Before the first time he holds a gun to your mother’s head.”
“I want a way out,” Catalina replied.
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. Sin Senos no hay Paraiso
“You pay later,” the clinic’s receptionist said with a knowing smile.
Back in Pereira, her mother held her without speaking. There were no reproaches, only the sound of the factory-worker’s hands trembling on her daughter’s back. “Run,” Ximena whispered, gripping her wrist
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.
When Albeiro took her to a party at Don Chalo’s mansion, she saw Ximena in person. The famous woman’s smile was a crack in a porcelain mask. Her eyes had the flat look of a hostage. Ximena pulled Catalina into a bathroom tiled entirely in gold. That night, Albeiro backhanded her for talking to
“Without breasts, there is no paradise,” she whispered, memorizing the phrase from a telenovela.