At less than six weeks it’s too early to determine the sex of the baby. An ultrasound has been scheduled for Juliana’s eighteenth week. They will postpone painting the nursery walls—rosy pink for a little girl, sailor-blue for a little boy.

Since the pregnancy, there has been a renewed energy in their life together. Focus, Patrick has said happily. All lives require focus.

Each commutes to work, but in contrary directions. Juliana hasn’t yet given much thought to what she will do after the baby is born, in what ways her life will be altered.

She hasn’t informed her employers, not just yet. Possibly next week.

The Delaware River is the border between New Jersey and Pennsylvania. In this former mill town on the river a young couple can afford a down payment on a renovated row house (originally built in 1922).

Thrift-shop furnishings, wallpaper bought at a discount. An overgrown backyard they’d cleared of debris—children’s broken toys, rotted lumber, even a pair of thigh-high fisherman’s boots. It would be a forty-minute drive from this house to the Wild Goose Tavern, the Shamrock Inn. The Black Rooster, across the river in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, is slightly closer.

Since she moved to the former mill town on the Delaware River, Juliana has not returned to these taverns. Not since meeting Patrick.

Since she has ceased drinking, Juliana has lost interest in bars, taverns, cafés. Though, admittedly, the sight of neon is a strong attraction.

Especially, Juliana would never drive to the Black Rooster alone, without a companion.

Solitary women seem to be more at risk now than they’d been when Juliana was in her early twenties. Risks she’d taken walking alone late at night, those nights she’d returned at midnight from the Mon ey Bar, she would never take now.

Has the world changed, Juliana wonders. Or has her perception of the world changed.

Sober now, she perceives the world as a sober place. Not hills and valleys but a plateau.

Still, she carries her (secret) weapon with her wherever she goes. Even to work, in a run-down urban neighborhood in Trenton, and even in the daytime, for (of course) she doesn’t remove the ice pick from the very bottom of her tote bag; most of the time she isn’t aware that it is there.

Not long ago something terrible had happened to a young woman, employee of a local hair salon, who’d gone for drinks at the Black Rooster with coworkers, was followed out of the tavern by an unidentified male patron, who came up behind her in the parking lot, struck her on the side of the head with his fist, and knocked her unconscious. He’d dragged her into a wooded area nearby, cut her clothing with a shears, and torn off her underwear, slashed her skin, “tortured” her with the shears, and left her for dead …