“It has to be this way, Fernanda,” Luis’s voice rasped through the small speaker of the cracked cell phone.(s) “If we tell her the truth, she’ll never agree. She’s old-fashioned. She thinks organs are… sacred.”
“She thinks you are sacred, Luis,” Fernanda’s voice countered, dripping with a cold, calculated impatience. “And that’s exactly why this works. The doctor at the clinic in Zurich is already on standby. We have forty-eight hours from the moment that kidney is harvested to get it on the flight. The buyer is paying three hundred thousand dollars. Do you have any idea what that does for us? It clears the debt on the house, it pays for Mario’s private school, and it gets us out of this dump.”
I felt the anesthesia—the small dose they had already administered—begin to swirl in my brain, but the horror was a shot of pure adrenaline that kept me tethered to the gurney. My heart monitor began to wail, a rhythmic beep-beep-beep that mirrored the frantic pounding in my chest.
“But she’s my mother,” Luis’s voice continued on the recording. He sounded weak, yes, but not like a man on the brink of death. He sounded like a man haggling over the price of a used car. “What if she doesn’t recover? What if her other kidney fails?”
“The doctors said she’s ‘strong for her age,'” Fernanda snapped. “And besides, we’ll tell her there were complications. We’ll tell her the transplant failed and the kidney had to be discarded. She’ll be too busy grieving for ‘saving’ you to ask questions. She’ll think she’s a hero. Everyone wins.”
The audio shifted. There was the sound of a chair scraping against a floor. Then, a third voice—Fernanda’s father, the man currently standing behind the glass in a tailored suit.
“The paperwork is already forged,” the father-in-law’s voice said, sounding disturbingly professional. “The hospital thinks this is a standard donation for Luis. But the surgical courier is waiting in the parking lot. Once Dr. Ramirez finishes the extraction, my contact in the lab will intercept the cooler. Luis, you just have to play the part for two more days. Stay in the bed. Keep the IV in. Look pale. It’s a three-hundred-thousand-dollar performance, son. Don’t ruin it now.”
The recording ended with a chilling silence, followed by the sound of Mario sobbing quietly in the background of the tape—the moment he must have been discovered or fled the room.
