I’m just coming out of my bedroom when I nearly collide with Mila.
“Hey, cousin.”
“Hi.”
She’s dressed for work, or more accurately mostly undressed for work with a short, black silk robe over nothing. She heads into the bathroom.
Mila isn’t my cousin, neither is Kim - I’m pretty sure of that - just like “Auntie” isn’t my aunt. The girls are twins even though their papers have them at different ages. All the girls lie about their age depending on circumstances. The sixteen year olds pass themselves off as twelve or, if the authorities come snooping, then they’re twenty. When they came here they were officially sixteen and seventeen, sixteen being the minimum age to work in a brothel. Although that’s being changed to eighteen, and they’re both legally eighteen, so there you go. I have no idea how old they are, but I’m thinking twenties passing themselves off as teenagers. Mom’s thirty-six, but you’d never know it.
...