I Had a Baby without You novel · Chapter 7 of 24

Chapter 7: Green Thread

The penthouse was white and quiet and nobody lived in it.

There was a leather couch, a long glass table, and a wall of windows with all of Chicago laid out under a gray sky.

Roark closed the door and locked it.

"Gretchen has a key," he said. "She doesn't have it anymore."

He crossed to the window and stood with his back to me.

"Say it again."

"Say what?"

"Morwen Cafferty."

His shoulders dropped with a quiet sigh.

"I've been wrong for five years," he said. "I need you to prove it."

"How?"

"Tell me what I said to you in the linen room."

I stood in the middle of his empty rug and told him the truth.

"You said the radiator banged like a ghost wanting in."

"Anyone could know that."

"You asked me what I looked like."

His head came up.

"I said brown hair, brown eyes, soft in all the wrong places," I said. "You said, wrong places, and you put your mouth on me."

The silence went on for a very long time.

"Gretchen doesn't know that," he said hoarsely.

"No."

"Nobody does." He turned around. "Come here."

I crossed the rug.

He pulled his shirt out of his trousers and lifted it, and I saw it for the first time in five years.

A long pale scar along his ribs, with seven small dots down its length.

The last stitch was crooked.

"I tied that one twice," I said.

My fingers were already on it, tracing the ridge.

He shuddered all over.

"Morwen."

"I didn't think I'd see it again."

"I couldn't see you," he said.

"That's the truth I've never told anyone but Gretchen.

I can't tell faces apart, Morwen.

Not yours, not hers, not my own in the mirror.

I know people by their voices, their walk, their hands."

I stared.

"You don't recognize faces."

"Prosopagnosia.

I've had it since I was a boy.

My uncle calls it my disability and the board calls it my weakness."

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