QUESTION: All right. Mrs. Doherty was upset by what you'd been saying. What had you been saying?
ANSWER: I told her about my affair with her husband.
QUESTION: Just like that?
ANSWER: Yes. I think I was very stupid. I hoped to persuade her to allow a separation. I knew her church doesn't allow divorce, but I thought she might permit us that much. I wanted my baby to have a father, married or not. It's bad, trying to grow up without a father. Mine died when I was seven. I wanted mine to have a father.
QUESTION: Yes, that was in the letter you wrote him.
ANSWER: Wrote but never mailed. I should have destroyed it.
QUESTION: Why didn't you mail it?
ANSWER: I'm not sure I can explain that. An obsession is a strange thing, and so is suicidal depression—and so's pregnancy. You don't just sit quiet and work out the mathematics. Your mind shifts and struggles like a thing in a web, tries to decide what matters most. The answers don't always stay the same. The day after I started that letter, I didn't go on with it because then I didn't even want Jimmy to know I was pregnant. I saw it wouldn't work out even if he were entirely free. Too different. We couldn't possibly have lived together. Then later I was trying again to think it might work—and so on.
QUESTION: Go on, please.