The Spare They Came Begging For novel · Chapter 9 of 32

Chapter 9: Paid Donor

Moira read it out loud at her kitchen table on Sunday morning, with her reading glasses on and her coffee going cold.

"'Questions Raised Over Public Hospital's Donor Recruitment.'"

The kid was under the table with a plastic hammerhead, making it swim around our ankles.

"'A source at Commonwealth Memorial says a Harbor City Hospital nurse being evaluated as a kidney donor is living rent-free in a home owned by a Harbor employee.'"

She looked at me over her glasses.

"That's me. I'm the employee. I'm famous now."

"Keep reading."

"'Federal law prohibits any payment or valuable consideration in exchange for an organ. The source suggested the arrangement may amount to inducement.'"

She put the paper down.

"Inducement. I fed you pizza on a floor."

"You fed me pizza on a floor and gave me a home," I said. "That's what they mean."

"Who's the source?"

"Who do you think?"

The article didn't use my name. It didn't have to.

Everybody who'd seen the clip knew who the Harbor nurse was.

At the bottom was one line from my mother.

"We only want Clare to be safe from people who would use her."

Moira took her glasses off and set them down very gently.

"I'm going to drive to Beacon Hill and set that woman's hedges on fire."

"No, you're not."

"Little bit on fire."

"You're going to get a pen," I said.

She looked at me.

"Do you have a lease form?"

"I have a lease form from the last tenant. The raccoon guy."

"Get it."

She got it from a drawer full of takeout menus and batteries.

We filled it out together at the kitchen table, with the kid reading the words he knew out loud from underneath.

"Rent," he said. "That's money."

Moira wrote eleven hundred a month. I made her write it.

"That's too much for that apartment. It smells like raccoon."

"It's what the top floors on this street go for. I looked it up last night."

"You looked it up."

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