The Spare They Came Begging For novel · Chapter 7 of 32

Chapter 7: Angry People

Conor didn't answer for a long moment.

Then he said, "No."

I turned all the way around on the step.

"No?"

"Not tonight. Not this month. Maybe not at all." He rubbed his face with both hands. "You just did CPR on a guy's heart rate in a bus aisle. Your family tried to steal a kidney from you five days ago. You're sitting in a stairwell drinking a juice box."

"The juice box was your idea."

"That's not the point."

"What is the point?"

"I don't take kidneys from people who are angry at somebody else."

"I'm not angry at him."

"No. You're angry at them." He pointed up, vaguely, toward the Back Bay. "And you want to do the one thing with your body that they can't touch. I get it. I'd want to do it too. That's exactly why I won't let you."

"You don't let me. It's my kidney."

"It's my scalpel."

We stared at each other.

His jaw was set.

I'd grown up with people who won arguments by never raising their voices.

I wasn't afraid of either kind.

"Fine," I said. "I'll go somewhere else."

"Go ahead. Every program in this city will ask you the same questions I'm asking. Except most of them will take ten minutes, and I'll take a month."

"Why?"

"Because I'm the one who has to look at you after."

He stood up and went back up the stairs.

At the door he stopped.

"You were really good on that bus, Albright."

Then he was gone.

I sat there until the stairwell light timed out and I had to wave my arm to turn it back on.

The next morning my mother was on the radio.

Moira played it in the break room on her phone, with the volume low.

My mother's voice was soft and steady, the voice she used to raise money.

"We love Clare. We'll always love Clare. She's been under enormous strain at that hospital. We just pray she comes home to her sister before it's too late."

"That hospital," Moira said. "Like we're a crack den."

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