Gillian Flynn - Gone Girl:

My stomach clenched. “I’m here because I wanted to see for myself your face when you talked about Amy,” I said. “I gotta tell you, it worries me. You get a little … moony.”

“One of us has to,” Desi said, again reasonably.

“Sweetheart?” A voice came from the back of the house, and another set of expensive shoes clattered toward the living room. “What was the name of that book— ”

The woman was a blurry vision of Amy, Amy in a steam-fogged mirror—exact coloring, extremely similar features, but a quarter century older, the flesh, the features, all let out a bit like a fine fabric. She was still gorgeous, a woman who chose to age gracefully. She was shaped like some sort of origami creation: elbows in extreme points, a clothes-hanger collarbone. She wore a china-blue sheath dress and had the same pull Amy did: When she was in a room, you kept turning your head back her way. She gave me a rather predatory smile.

“Hello, I’m Jacqueline Collings.”

“Mother, this is Amy’s husband, Nick,” Desi said.

“Amy.” The woman smiled again. She had a bottom-of-a-well voice, deep and strangely resonant. “We’ve been quite interested in that story around here. Yes, very interested.” She turned coldly to her son. “We can never stop thinking about the superb Amy Elliott, can we?”

“Amy Dunne now,” I said.

“Of course,” Jacqueline agreed. “I’m so sorry, Nick, for what you’re going through.” She stared at me a moment. “I’m sorry, I must … I didn’t picture Amy with such an … American boy.” She seemed to be speaking neither to me nor to Desi. “Good God, he even has a cleft chin.”

“I came over to see if your son had any information,” I said. “I know he’s written my wife a lot of letters over the years.”

“Oh, the letters !” Jacqueline smiled angrily. “Such an interesting way to spend one’s time, don’t you think?”

“Amy shared them with you?” Desi asked. “I’m surprised.”

“No,” I said, turning to him. “She threw them away unopened, always.”

“All of them? Always? You know that?” Desi said, still smiling.

“Once I went through the trash to read one.” I turned back to Jacqueline. “Just to see what exactly was going on.”

“Good for you,” Jacqueline said, purring at me. “I’d expect nothing less of my husband.”

“Amy and I always wrote each other letters,” Desi said. He had his mother’s cadence, the delivery that indicated everything he said was something you’d want to hear. “It was our thing. I find e-mail so … cheap. And no one saves them. No one saves an e-mail, because it’s so inherently impersonal. I worry about posterity in general. All the great love letters—from Simone de Beauvoir to Sartre, from Samuel Clemens to his wife, Olivia—I don’t know, I always think about what will be lost—”

“Have you kept all my letters?” Jacqueline asked. She was standing at the fireplace, looking down on us, one long sinewy arm trailing along the mantelpiece.

“Of course.”

She turned to me with an elegant shrug. “Just curious.”

I shivered, was about to reach out toward the fireplace for warmth, but remembered that it was July. “It seems to me a rather strange devotion to keep up all these years,” I said. “I mean, she didn’t write you back.”

That lit up Desi’s eyes. “Oh” was all he said, the sound of someone who spied a surprise firework.

“It strikes me as odd, Nick, that you’d come here and ask Desi about his relationship—or lack thereof—with your wife,” Jacqueline Collings said. “Are you and Amy not close? I can guarantee you: Desi has had no genuine contact with Amy in decades. Decades.”

“I’m just checking in, Jacqueline. Sometimes you have to see something for yourself.”

Jacqueline started walking toward the door; she turned and gave me a single twist of her head to assure me that it was time to go.

“How very intrepid of you, Nick. Very do-it-yourself. Do you build your own decks too?” She laughed at the word and opened the door for me. I stared at the hollow of her neck and wondered why she wasn’t wearing a noose of pearls. Women like this always have thick strands of pearls to click and clack. I could smell her, though, a female scent, vaginal and strangely lewd.

“It was interesting to meet you, Nick,” she said. “Let’s all hope Amy gets home safely. Until then, the next time you want to get in touch with Desi?”

She pressed a thick, creamy card into my hands. “Call our lawyer, please.”

AMY ELLIOTT DUNNE

AUGUST 17, 2011

DIARY ENTRY

I know this sounds the stuff of moony teenage girls, but I’ve been tracking Nick’s moods. Toward me. Just to make sure I’m not crazy. I’ve got a calendar, and I put hearts on any day Nick seems to love me again, and black squares when he doesn’t. The past year was all black squares, pretty much.

But now? Nine days of hearts. In a row. Maybe all he needed to know was how much I loved him and how unhappy I’d become. Maybe he had a change of heart . I’ve never loved a phrase more.

Quiz: After over a year of coldness, your husband suddenly seems to love you again. You:

a) Go on and on about how much he’s hurt you so he can apologize some more.

b) Give him the cold shoulder for a while longer—so he learns his lesson!

c) Don’t press him about his new attitude—know that he will confide in you when the time comes, and in the meantime, shower him with affection so he feels secure and loved, because that’s how this marriage thing works.

d) Demand to know what went wrong; make him talk and talk about it in order to calm your own neuroses.

Answer: C

It’s August, so sumptuous that I couldn’t bear any more black squares, but no, it’s been nothing but hearts, Nick acting like my husband, sweet and loving and goofy. He orders me chocolates from my favorite shop in New York for a treat, and he writes me a silly poem to go with them. A limerick, actually:

There once was a girl from Manhattan

Who slept only on sheets made of satin

Her husband slipped and he slided

And their bodies collided

So they did something dirty in Latin .

It would be funnier if our sex life were as carefree as the rhyme would suggest. But last week we did … fuck ? Do it ? Something more romantic than have sex but less cheesy than make love . He came home from work and kissed me full on the lips, and he touched me as if I were really there. I almost cried, I’d been so lonely. To be kissed on the lips by your husband is the most decadent thing.

What else? He takes me swimming in the same pond he’s gone to since he was a child. I can picture little Nick flapping around manically, face and shoulders sunburned red because (just like now) he refuses to wear sunscreen, forcing Mama Mo to chase after him with lotion that she swipes on whenever she can reach him.

He’s been taking me on a full tour of his boyhood haunts, like I asked him to for ages. He walks me to the edge of the river, and he kisses me as the wind whips my hair (“My two favorite things to look at in the world,” he whispers in my ear). He kisses me in a funny little playground fort that he once considered his own clubhouse (“I always wanted to bring a girl here, a perfect girl, and look at me now,” he whispers in my ear). Two days before the mall closes for good, we ride carousel bunnies side by side, our laughter echoing through the empty miles.

He takes me for a sundae at his favorite ice cream parlor, and we have the place to ourselves in the morning, the air all sticky with sweets. He kisses me and says this place is where he stuttered and suffered through so many dates, and he wishes he could have told his high school self that he would be back here with the girl of his dreams someday. We eat ice cream until we have to roll home and get under the covers. His hand on my belly, an accidental nap.