If you could save someone's life, would you? Anyone's? Ali's older brother has a swastika tattooed on his knuckles, a prison ID number for nearly beating an immigrant to death, and spent his teenage years ruthlessly persecuting Ali for being gay. Blood may be thicker than water, but Ali has spent most of his life desperate to prove he is nothing like Tony. A committed vegetarian, charity-supporter, and blood donor, Ali would do anything for anyone. Ali may share parentage with Tony, but he’s determined not to share anything else if he can help it. So when Tony contracts leukaemia, and Ali is the only match for the urgently-needed bone marrow transplant, Ali is caught between two equally awful choices: to refuse and condemn a man to death, or to donate. And in donating, save the life of the man who nearly murdered Ali's Iraqi boyfriend?

Thicker Than Bone

“Thank you,” he whispered, because it was the only thing he could say.


The phone started ringing, but neither of them made a move to answer it.


Ali went from asleep to awake in a second, and lay wide-eyed in the dark for only a moment before a deafening clap of thunder rattled the glass in the windows. The lump that had disturbed him shot from around his ankles to around his armpit.


“Hey, Moxie,” he murmured sleepily, turning on his side and tucking the bundle of fuzz into his chest. She shrank against him at the next boom, and Ali blearily reached across the bed for the other member of his tiny makeshift family that didn’t like thunderstorms. “Yaz,” he mumbled when he encountered a tense shoulder and an arm raised up over Yazid’s head.


And then Yazid said something, and Ali stirred himself into proper wakefulness.


Chapter 70