Gillian Flynn - Gone Girl:

“Even I have to?” As if I am already being resistant. I feel a burst of anger that I swallow.

“This is what we’re going to do. We are going to do the right thing. We are going to help my parents for once.”

Of course that’s what we have to do, and of course if he had presented the problem to me like I wasn’t his enemy, that’s what I would have said. But he came out of the door already treating me like a problem that needed to be dealt with. I was the bitter voice that needed to be squelched.

My husband is the most loyal man on the planet until he’s not. I’ve seen his eyes literally turn a shade darker when he’s felt betrayed by a friend, even a dear longtime friend, and then the friend is never mentioned again. He looked at me then like I was an object to be jettisoned if necessary. It actually chilled me, that look.

So it is decided that quickly, with that little of a debate: We are leaving New York. We are going to Missouri. To a house in Missouri by the river where we will live. It is surreal, and I’m not one to misuse the word surreal .

I know it will be okay. It’s just so far from what I pictured. When I pictured my life. That’s not to say bad, just … If you gave me a million guesses where life would take me, I wouldn’t have guessed. I find that alarming.

The packing of the U-Haul is a mini-tragedy: Nick, determined and guilty, his mouth a tight line, getting it done, unwilling to look at me. The U-Haul sits for hours, blocking traffic on our little street, blinking its hazard lights—danger, danger, danger—as Nick goes up and down the stairs, a one-man assembly line, carrying boxes of books, boxes of kitchen supplies, chairs, side tables. We are bringing our vintage sofa—our broad old chesterfield that Dad calls our pet, we dote on it so much. It is to be the last thing we pack, a sweaty, awkward two-person job. Getting the massive thing down our stairs ( Hold on, I need to rest. Lift to the right. Hold on, you’re going too fast. Watch out, my fingers my fingers! ) will be its own much-needed team-building exercise. After the sofa, we’ll pick up lunch from the corner deli, bagel sandwiches to eat on the road. Cold soda.

Nick lets me keep the sofa, but our other big items are staying in New York. One of Nick’s friends will inherit the bed; the guy will come by later to our empty home—nothing but dust and cable cords left—and take the bed, and then he’ll live his New York life in our New York bed, eating two A.M. Chinese food and having lazy-condomed sex with tipsy, brass-mouthed girls who worked in PR. (Our home itself will be taken over by a noisy couple, hubby-wife lawyers who are shamelessly, brazenly gleeful at this buyers’-market deal. I hate them.)

I carry one load for every four that Nick grunts down. I move slowly, shuffling, like my bones hurt, a feverish delicacy descending on me. Everything does hurt. Nick buzzes past me, going up or down, and throws his frown at me, snaps “You okay?” and keeps moving before I answer, leaves me gaping, a cartoon with a black mouth-hole. I am not okay. I will be okay, but right now I am not okay. I want my husband to put his arms around me, to console me, to baby me a little bit. Just for a second.

Inside the back of the truck, he fusses with the boxes. Nick prides himself on his packing skills: He is (was) the loader of the dishwasher, the packer of the holiday bags. But by hour three, it is clear that we’ve sold or gifted too many of our belongings. The U-Haul’s massive cavern is only half full. It gives me my single satisfaction of the day, that hot, mean satisfaction right in the belly, like a nib of mercury. Good , I think. Good .

“We can take the bed if you really want to,” Nick says, looking past me down the street. “We have enough room.”

“No, you promised it to Wally, Wally should have it,” I say primly.

I was wrong . Just say: I was wrong, I’m sorry, let’s take the bed. You should have your old, comforting bed in this new place . Smile at me and be nice to me. Today, be nice to me.

Nick blows out a sigh. “Okay, if that’s what you want. Amy? Is it?” He stands, slightly breathless, leaning on a stack of boxes, the top one with Magic Marker scrawl: AMY CLOTHES WINTER. “This is the last I’ll hear about the bed, Amy? Because I’m offering right now. I’m happy to pack the bed for you.”

“How gracious of you,” I say, just a whiff of breath, the way I say most retorts: a puff of perfume from a rank atomizer. I am a coward. I don’t like confrontation. I pick up a box and start toward the truck.

“What did you say?”

I shake my head at him. I don’t want him to see me cry, because it will make him more angry.

Ten minutes later, the stairs are pounding—bang! bang! bang! Nick is dragging our sofa down by himself.

I can’t even look behind me as we leave New York, because the truck has no back window. In the side mirror, I track the skyline (the receding skyline —isn’t that what they write in Victorian novels where the doomed heroine is forced to leave her ancestral home?), but none of the good buildings—not the Chrysler or the Empire State or the Flatiron, they never appear in that little shining rectangle.

My parents dropped by the night before, presented us with the family cuckoo clock that I’d loved as a child, and the three of us cried and hugged as Nick shuffled his hands in his pockets and promised to take care of me.

He promised to take care of me, and yet I feel afraid. I feel like something is going wrong, very wrong, and that it will get even worse. I don’t feel like Nick’s wife. I don’t feel like a person at all: I am something to be loaded and unloaded, like a sofa or a cuckoo clock. I am something to be tossed into a junkyard, thrown into the river, if necessary. I don’t feel real anymore. I feel like I could disappear.

NICK DUNNE

THREE DAYS GONE

The police weren’t going to find Amy unless someone wanted her found. That much was clear. Everything green and brown had been searched: miles of the muddy Mississippi River, all the trails and hiking paths, our sad collection of patchy woods. If she were alive, someone would need to return her. If she were dead, nature would have to give her up. It was a palpable truth, like a sour taste on the tongue tip. I arrived at the volunteer center and realized everyone else knew this too: There was a listlessness, a defeat, that hung over the place. I wandered aimlessly over to the pastries station and tried to convince myself to eat something. Danish. I’d come to believe there was no food more depressing than Danish, a pastry that seemed stale upon arrival.

“I still say it’s the river,” one volunteer was saying to his buddy, both of them picking through the pastries with dirty fingers. “Right behind the guy’s house, what easier way?”

“She would have turned up in an eddy by now, a lock, something.”

“Not if she’s been cut. Chop off the legs, the arms … the body can shoot all the way to the Gulf. Tunica, at least.”

I turned away before they noticed me.

A former teacher of mine, Mr. Coleman, sat at a card table, hunched over the tip-line phone, scribbling down information. When I caught his eye, he made the cuckoo signal: finger circling his ear, then pointing at the phone. He had greeted me yesterday by saying, “My granddaughter was killed by a drunk driver, so …” We’d murmured and patted each other awkwardly.

My cell rang, the disposable—I couldn’t figure out where to keep it, so I kept it on me. I’d made a call, and the call was being returned, but I couldn’t take it. I turned the phone off, scanned the room to make sure the Elliotts hadn’t seen me do it. Marybeth was clicking away on her BlackBerry, then holding it at arm’s length so she could read the text. When she saw me, she shot over in her tight quick steps, holding the BlackBerry in front of her like a talisman.