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Delicate and troubled, Virginia (Jennifer Connelly) has survived in her tourist town, despite hints of mental illness, thanks to her beauty and her wonderfully irrational optimism. An affair with Sheriff Tipton (Ed Harris) has dragged on for years with no resolution, but Virginia lives in hope. She's been willing to indulge both the sheriff's bedroom prayer-sessions and his secret taste for fetish sex, but when he announces his plan to run for the state senate, their affair runs the risk of becoming a political liability.

Virginia's teenaged son Emmett (Harrison Gilbertson) isn't faring as well as his mother. Perpetually embarrassed by her, he now seeks contact with the father he never knew. Using genetics lessons half-learned in science class, he begins searching the town for his paternal match. Virginia takes a similar opportunity to reinvent her reality. Rejecting a medical diagnosis she doesn't like, she decides instead that she is pregnant. When her body fails to cooperate, she stuffs pantyhose to create a bulge and announces to everyone who will listen, "I'm pregnant with Sheriff Tipton's baby."