It has been just a month. Already Juliana feels changes in her body, she is certain she isn’t imagining … Fascinating, though in a way frightening, for isn’t this her body?

Exactly as she’d imagined, Patrick is in awe of her and of the pregnancy.

Pregnant women are the most beautiful women.

I am the happiest man alive.

Soon Juliana will be thirty years old. By which time she and Patrick will be married.

A good man, a kindly man, reliable, intelligent—knowing little of Juliana’s former, secret life before she’d met him.

Why is Patrick not more curious, Juliana wonders.

To Juliana, curious and suspicious are near synonymous.

In this lack of curiosity, this trustfulness, Patrick somewhat resembles Gordon Kechel.

Once a drinker, always a drinker whether drinking or not—Juliana understands this principle but has never considered herself a drinker in any clinical sense. Not an alcoholic.

Ned Spires had been an alcoholic. Not Juliana.

Life-saving to Juliana, she’d managed to escape the man. He’d pleaded with her to stay with him, to marry him, he’d divorce his wife of twenty-five years and marry her, but Juliana understood this was folly, she’d escaped with her life.

As Juliana is a good, steady driver, in control of her vehicle, so (she tells herself) she is in control of her drinking.

She has yet to visit the Blue Moon. Months living in this town, aware of the Blue Moon, which she passes frequently and which exerts no particular pull on her, except at night when the blue neon sign glimmers in the window and her heart is quickened to the point of pain.

So deeply moved sometimes, she has to brake her car, park at a curb until the powerful emotion has passed.

All that I have lost. But—what is it I have lost?

Even if she were still drinking, Juliana reasons, she’d have stopped by now. Since learning she was pregnant. She’d have stopped on the very day she’d found out.

The pregnancy is still something of a shock to her. When she wakes in the morning and the realization sweeps over her. As if in her dreams there is no pregnancy, her body remains a girl’s body, untouched.

Waking, she is stunned to realize her situation. Her condition. Not an idea, a physical fact. On the calendar there is marked the (probable) due date—July of next year …

So far away! Juliana feels a touch of panic that she will not be able to bring this pregnancy to term. Already she has found out, no reason except wishing to know, mere curiosity, how late in a pregnancy a woman can safely have an abortion.

She hasn’t yet given much thought to childbirth, to an (actual) infant she will be nursing. She has thought fancifully of the upstairs room in the house on Mill Street, which she and Patrick will convert into a nursery.