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

The little waiting room—more of a space with chairs along a long corridor—was almost empty aside from a little elderly woman with a trailing hand-knitted scarf.


Ali clutched Yazid’s hand as though it were those first few scary days in the oncology unit all those years ago. It seemed strange for this all to be about Ali. Hospitals had never been about him before, and he hated it.


“Okay?” Yazid murmured as the clock on the wall ticked over to ten o’clock.


“Not the needles that bother me.” Of course it was just needles. He wasn’t getting it taken out of the hip or anything. They’d give him a course of drugs to make his bones produce more of the cells Tony needed, and then at the end of the week they’d take a huge blood sample. And repeat until they had enough. It was easy. The easiest way in the world to save a life—or maybe second. Maybe just blood donation was easiest. But still, it took nothing.


Chapter 88