I thought about my mother’s prescriptions and the rent deadline and the hospital bills stacked on my kitchen counter like a second, worse set of walls.

I thought about the apology in Evelyn’s voice every time she caught me looking worried.

And I said yes.

I hated myself as I said it.

I felt like an imposter and a mercenary, a man trading an old woman’s frail heart for a bottle of pills, and I walked out of that tower with five hundred dollars in my pocket and a weight on my conscience that I did not yet know was about to be lifted by the very woman I was being paid to deceive.

I told myself, on the way home, the things a person tells himself.