“Then let’s get in the car.”
“I don’t have a car seat for Atlas.”
“I’ll hold him and we won’t go anywhere.” With his free hand, he reached for her, placing a light palm on her cheek. “Please talk to me.”
He could practically feel her melt. “’Kay. Get in.”
He climbed into the passenger seat of her SUV, not sure he’d ever been in this car before. Careful to hold Atlas and wishing he had a binky for him to chew, instead of Jonah’s hair, he waited until she stowed her bag in the back and slid behind the wheel.
The car was dark and warm and smelled vaguely of flour, as if she’d used it to cart warm bread to the old people at the nursing home where she volunteered. Knowing her, she probably had done exactly that this morning.
She leaned back against the headrest and looked up for one moment, gathering herself, and then she turned to him.
“Okay.”
“Okay,” he replied, ready for absolutely anything.
“I have a medical thing,” she started, surprising him.
He had never considered that. For some reason, he figured her secret was romantic or dangerous or had something to do with her time in New York. Maybe some bad choices or a dark past or a run-in with the law. He never went…medical.
“What is it?”
“When I was sixteen, actually, almost seventeen, we discovered there was a very specific and rare reason I’d never had a period.”
Nope. Never went there. “And?”
“I have something called—brace yourself, it’s a mouthful—Mayer-Rokitansky-Küster-Hauser syndrome.”
He had no idea what she just said. None. “Mayer…what?”
“Just call it MRKH. That’s what it’s referred to.”
“What is it?”
She swallowed, staring straight ahead, silent long enough that Atlas stopped hair chewing and moved to Jonah’s collar.
“I was born without a uterus.”
He was very still. Did she say…
“Oh,” he breathed. “How…how does that work?”
“Just fine,” she said. “I have ovaries that function and my hormones are normal. I went through puberty like every other girl. I look like a woman, I am a woman, I have all the parts you can see and most of the parts you can’t. But the one organ necessary to grow a baby? Didn’t get one. It happens at six weeks in utero to roughly around one in five thousand women and no one knows why. It’s not unheard of or unhealthy or dangerous or anything like that. It’s just…no uterus.”
“Oh, wow, Pepper. That’s…” That’s the thing she was carrying. Except she wasn’t carrying anything, including a baby, ever, he presumed. “How does it affect you?”
“Sometimes, I forget about it. I live a perfectly normal life, as a dancer and a happy, healthy woman. But…” She gave a totally humorless smile. “I cannot get pregnant. I cannot carry a child. That part of being a woman is closed for me and will never change.”
He nodded. He couldn’t really do anything else but absorb this new information.
“I make eggs,” she added. “That’s my consolation prize. As far as anyone knows, I make normal eggs, but I never get a period because I don’t have a uterine lining to shed.”
He was way out of his league on this one, but having gone through pregnancy with Carly, he did understand exactly how that worked.
“Then you could freeze your eggs and have a baby.”
She slid him a look. “In theory, yes. But a surrogate would have to carry it.”
