I have been asked — by the few people who know the whole story — whether it was fair to keep it from him, and I understand the question, and I have not run from it.

A man has a right to know he has a child; I believe that, in general, as a principle.

But principles live in a world of specifics, and the specific man in front of me was one who had told his lawyer, in a public hallway, that our marriage had been a waste of his best breeding years — who had spent five years teaching me that my body’s failures were moral failures, mine to be ashamed of.

I did not withhold the pregnancy to wound him.