Gillian Flynn - Gone Girl:

As for bringing back the goodwill, that was another conciliation. After my father was completely lost to the Alzheimer’s, we decided to sell his place, so Amy and I went through his house, putting together boxes for Goodwill. Amy, of course, was a whirling dervish of doing—pack, store, toss—while I sifted through my father’s things glacially. For me, everything was a clue. A mug with deeper coffee stains than the others must be his favorite. Was it a gift? Who gave it to him? Or did he buy it himself? I pictured my father finding the very act of shopping emasculating. Still, an inspection of his closet revealed five pairs of shoes, shiny new, still in their boxes. Had he bought these himself, picturing a different, more social Bill Dunne than the one slowly unspooling alone? Did he go to Shoe-Be-Doo-Be, get my mother to help him, just another in a long line of her casual kindnesses? Of course, I didn’t share any of these musings with Amy, so I’m sure I came off as the goldbricker I so often am.

“Here. A box. For Goodwill,” she said, catching me on the floor, leaning against a wall, staring at a shoe. “You put the shoes in the box. Okay?” I was embarrassed, I snarled at her, she snapped at me, and … the usual.

I should add, in Amy’s defense, that she’d asked me twice if I wanted to talk, if I was sure I wanted to do this. I sometimes leave out details like that. It’s more convenient for me. In truth, I wanted her to read my mind so I didn’t have to stoop to the womanly art of articulation. I was sometimes as guilty of playing the figure-me-out game as Amy was. I’ve left that bit of information out too.

I’m a big fan of the lie of omission.

I pulled up in front of my dad’s house just after ten P.M. It was a tidy little place, a good starter home (or ender home). Two bedrooms, two baths, dining room, dated but decent kitchen. A for-sale sign rusted in the front yard. One year and not a bite.

I entered the stuffy house, the heat rolling over me. The budget alarm system we installed after the third break-in began beeping, like a bomb countdown. I input the code, the one that drove Amy insane because it went against every rule about codes. It was my birthday: 81577.

Code rejected . I tried again. Code rejected . A bead of sweat rolled down my back. Amy had always threatened to change the code. She said it was pointless to have one that was so guessable, but I knew the real reason. She resented that it was my birthday and not our anniversary: Once again I’d chosen me over us . My semi-sweet nostalgia for Amy disappeared. I stabbed my finger at the numbers again, growing more panicked as the alarm beeped and beeped and beeped its countdown—until it went into full intruder blare.

Woooonk-woooonk-woooonk!

My cell phone was supposed to ring so I could give the all-clear: Just me, the idiot . But it didn’t. I waited a full minute, the alarm reminding me of a torpedoed-submarine movie. The canned heat of a closed house in July shimmered over me. My shirt back was already soaked. Goddammit, Amy . I scanned the alarm for the company’s number and found nothing. I pulled over a chair and began yanking at the alarm; I had it off the wall, hanging by the cords, when my phone finally rang. A bitchy voice on the other end demanded Amy’s first pet’s name.

Woooonk-woooonk-woooonk!

It was exactly the wrong tone—smug, petulant, utterly unconcerned—and exactly the wrong question, because I didn’t know the answer, which infuriated me. No matter how many clues I solved, I’d be faced with some Amy trivia to unman me.

“Look, this is Nick Dunne, this is my dad’s house, this account was set up by me,” I snapped. “So it doesn’t really fucking matter what my wife’s first pet’s name was.”

Woooonk-woooonk-woooonk!

“Please don’t take that tone with me, sir.”

“Look, I just came in to grab one thing from my dad’s house, and now I’m leaving, okay?”

“I have to notify the police immediately.”

“Can you just turn off the goddamn alarm so I can think?”

Woooonk-woooonk-woooonk!

“The alarm’s off.”

“The alarm is not off.”

“Sir, I warned you once, do not take that tone with me.”

You fucking bitch .

“You know what? Fuck it, fuck it, fuck it .”

I hung up just as I remembered Amy’s cat’s name, the very first one: Stuart.

I called back, got a different operator, a reasonable operator, who turned off the alarm and, God bless her, called off the police. I really wasn’t in the mood to explain myself.

I sat on the thin, cheap carpet and made myself breathe, my heart clattering. After a minute, after my shoulders untensed and my jaw unclenched and my hands unfisted and my heart returned to normal, I stood up and momentarily debated just leaving, as if that would teach Amy a lesson. But as I stood up, I saw a blue envelope left on the kitchen counter like a Dear John note.

I took a deep breath, blew it out—new attitude—and opened the envelope, pulled out the letter marked with a heart.

Hi Darling,

So we both have things we want to work on. For me, it’d be my perfectionism, my occasional (wishful thinking?) self-righteousness. For you? I know you worry that you’re sometimes too distant, too removed, unable to be tender or nurturing. Well, I want to tell you—here in your father’s house—that isn’t true. You are not your father. You need to know that you are a good man, you are a sweet man, you are kind. I’ve punished you for not being able to read my mind sometimes, for not being able to act in exactly the way I wanted you to act right at exactly that moment. I punished you for being a real, breathing man . I ordered you around instead of trusting you to find your way. I didn’t give you the benefit of the doubt: that no matter how much you and I blunder, you always love me and want me to be happy. And that should be enough for any girl, right? I worry I’ve said things about you that aren’t actually true, and that you’ve come to believe them. So I am here to say now: You are WARM. You are my sun.

If Amy were with me, as she’d planned on being, she would have nuzzled into me the way she used to do, her face in the crook of my neck, and she would have kissed me and smiled and said, You are, you know. My sun . My throat tight, I took a final look around my father’s house and left, closing the door on the heat. In my car, I fumbled open the envelope marked fourth clue. We had to be near the end.

Picture me: I’m a girl who is very bad

I need to be punished, and by punished, I mean had

It’s where you store goodies for anniversary five

Pardon me if this is getting contrived!

A good time was had here right at sunny midday

Then out for a cocktail, all so terribly gay .

So run there right now, full of sweet sighs ,

And open the door for your big surprise .

My stomach seized. I didn’t know what this one meant. I reread it. I couldn’t even guess. Amy had stopped taking it easy on me. I wasn’t going to finish the treasure hunt after all.

I felt a surge of angst. What a fucking day. Boney was out to get me, Noelle was insane, Shawna was pissed, Hilary was resentful, the woman at the security company was a bitch, and my wife had stumped me finally. It was time to end this goddamn day. There was only one woman I could stand to be around right now.

Go took one look at me—rattled, tight-lipped, and heat-exhausted from my dad’s—and parked me on the couch, announced she’d make some late dinner. Five minutes later, she was stepping carefully toward me, balancing my meal on an ancient TV tray. An old Dunne standby: grilled cheese and BBQ chips, a plastic cup of …