He Let Our Baby Die Over a Hospital Bill novel · Chapter 12 of 32
Chapter 12: Core Retention
I read the sentence twice, standing in the courthouse doorway with people pushing past me.
Restricts card access.
Core retention feature.
"Retention," I said. "That means keeping customers."
"It means keeping couples," the reporter said. "You freeze the one who owes. She can't leave the app without paying the other one. So nobody leaves."
She put a business card in my hand.
"If you ever want to go on the record, I'm here."
I went home on the bus and sat on Gina's couch until she came in from work.
"It's the product," I said.
"What is?"
"The thing that froze me in the birth suite. He didn't break it for me. He built it to do that. It's what he's selling."
Gina put her bag down very slowly.
"On October fifteenth it goes public," I said. "After that, it belongs to everybody who buys a share. Thousands of people, all wanting it to keep working. Nobody kills it after that."
I stood up.
"I'm going to kill it first."
Gina took her red glasses off, cleaned them on her hoodie and put them back on.
"Okay," she said. "How?"
"I don't know yet. I need the women."
The laundromat closed at ten. The owner let us stay after.
On the last Tuesday in July, the women came.
The mother from Lakewood came with her son, who was nine and had brought a tablet and headphones and no interest in any of us.
The woman from Colorado Springs drove up an hour with a casserole dish of lasagna under foil.
The woman from Fort Collins came last with her baby in a carrier on her chest.
Her husband had stayed home.
She said he didn't think it was a big deal.
Gina's neighbor came with paper plates. The widow came with a pound cake.
Abe came at nine with a sheet pan of something and the smell of cumin, in a T-shirt on his night off.
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