Gillian Flynn - Gone Girl:

They gave each other a he serious? look.

“Nick,” Boney said. “We have no reason to believe that the woman in the photos who looks exactly like your wife and who Noelle Hawthorne, a mother of three, your wife’s best friend here in town, says is your wife, is not your wife.”

“Your wife who—I should say—according to Noelle, you married for money,” Gilpin added.

“I’m not joking,” I said. “Anyone these days can doctor photos on a laptop.”

“Okay, so a minute ago you were sure Desi Collings was involved, and now you’ve moved on to Noelle Hawthorne,” Gilpin said. “It seems like you’re really casting about for someone to blame.”

“Besides me? Yes, I am. Look, I did not marry Amy for her money. You really should talk more with Amy’s parents. They know me, they know my character.” They don’t know everything , I thought, my stomach seizing. Boney was watching me; she looked sort of sorry for me. Gilpin didn’t even seem to be listening.

“You bumped up the life insurance coverage on your wife to one-point-two million,” Gilpin said with mock weariness. He even pulled a hand over his long, thin-jawed face.

“Amy did that herself!” I said quickly. The cops both just looked at me and waited. “I mean, I filed the paperwork, but it was Amy’s idea. She insisted. I swear, I couldn’t care less, but Amy said—she said, given the change in her income, it made her feel more secure or something, or it was a smart business decision. Fuck, I don’t know, I don’t know why she wanted it. I didn’t ask her to.”

“Two months ago, someone did a search on your laptop,” Boney continued. “ Body Float Mississippi River . Can you explain that?”

I took two deep breaths, nine seconds to pull myself together.

“God, that was just a dumb book idea,” I said. “I was thinking about writing a book.”

“Hunh,” Boney replied.

“Look, here’s what I think is happening,” I began. “I think a lot of people watch these news programs where the husband is always this awful guy who kills his wife, and they are seeing me through that lens, and some really innocent, normal things are being twisted. This is turning into a witch hunt.”

“That’s how you explain those credit-card bills?” Gilpin asked.

“I told you, I can’t explain the fucking credit-card bills because I have nothing to do with them. It’s your fucking job to figure out where they came from!”

They sat silent, side by side, waiting.

“What is currently being done to find my wife?” I asked. “What leads are you exploring, besides me?”

The house began shaking, the sky ripped, and through the back window, we could see a jet shooting past, right over the river, buzzing us.

“F-10,” Rhonda said.

“Nah, too small,” Gilpin said. “It’s got to be—”

“It’s an F-10.”

Boney leaned toward me, hands entwined. “It’s our job to make sure you are in the hundred percent clear, Nick,” she said. “I know you want that too. Now if you can just help us out with the few little tangles—because that’s what they are, they keep tripping us up.”

“Maybe it’s time I got a lawyer.”

The cops exchanged another look, as if they’d settled a bet.

AMY ELLIOTT DUNNE

OCTOBER 21, 2011

DIARY ENTRY

Nick’s mom is dead. I haven’t been able to write because Nick’s mom is dead, and her son has come unmoored. Sweet, tough Maureen. She was up and moving around until days before she died, refusing to discuss any sort of slowdown. “I just want to live until I can’t anymore,” she said. She’d gotten into knitting caps for other chemo patients (she herself was done done done after one round, no interest in prolonging life if it meant “more tubes”), so I’ll remember her always surrounded by bright knots of wool: red and yellow and green, and her fingers moving, the needles click-clacking while she talked in her contented-cat voice, all deep, sleepy purr.

And then one morning in September she woke but didn’t really wake, didn’t become Maureen. She was a bird-size woman overnight, that fast, all wrinkles and shell, her eyes darting around the room, unable to place anything, including herself. So then came the hospice, a gently lit, cheerful place with paintings of women in bonnets and rolling hills of bounty, and snack machines, and small coffees. The hospice was not expected to fix her or help her but just to make sure she died comfortably, and just three days later, she did. Very matter-of-fact, the way Maureen would have wanted it (although I’m sure she would have rolled her eyes at that phrase: the way Maureen would have wanted it ).

Her wake was modest but nice—with hundreds of people, her look-alike sister from Omaha bustling by proxy, pouring coffee and Baileys and handing out cookies and telling funny stories about Mo. We buried her on a gusty, warm morning, Go and Nick leaning in to each other as I stood nearby, feeling intrusive. That night in bed, Nick let me put my arms around him, his back to me, but after a few minutes he got up, whispered, “Got to get some air,” and left the house.

His mother had always mothered him—she insisted on coming by once a week and ironing for us, and when she was done ironing, she’d say, “I’ll just help tidy,” and after she’d left, I’d look in the fridge and find she’d peeled and sliced his grapefruit for him, put the pieces in a snap-top container, and then I’d open the bread and discover all the crusts had been cut away, each slice returned half naked. I am married to a thirty-four-year-old man who is still offended by bread crusts.

But I tried to do the same those first weeks after his mom passed. I snipped the bread crusts, I ironed his T-shirts, I baked a blueberry pie from his mom’s recipe. “I don’t need to be babied, really, Amy,” he said as he stared at the loaf of skinned breads. “I let my mom do it because it made her happy, but I know you don’t like that nurturing stuff.”

So we’re back to black squares. Sweet, doting, loving Nick is gone. Gruff, peeved, angry Nick is back. You are supposed to lean on your spouse in hard times, but Nick seems to have gone even farther away. He is a mama’s boy whose mama is dead. He doesn’t want anything to do with me.

He uses me for sex when he needs to. He presses me against a table or over the back of the bed and fucks me, silent until the last few moments, those few quick grunts, and then he releases me, he puts a palm on the small of my back, his one gesture of intimacy, and he says something that is supposed to make it seem like a game: “You’re so sexy, sometimes I can’t control myself.” But he says it in a dead voice.

Quiz: Your husband, with whom you once shared a wonderful sex life, has turned distant and cold—he only wants sex his way, on his time. You:

a) Withhold sex further—he’s not going to win this game!

b) Cry and whine and demand answers he’s not yet ready to give, further alienating him.

c) Have faith that this is just a bump in a long marriage—he is in a dark place—so try to be understanding and wait it out.

Answer: C. Right?

It bothers me that my marriage is disintegrating and I don’t know what to do. You’d think my parents, the double psychologists, would be the obvious people to talk to, but I have too much pride. They would not be good for marital advice: They are soul mates, remember? They are all peaks, no valleys—a single, infinite burst of marital ecstasy. I can’t tell them I am screwing up the one thing I have left: my marriage. They’d somehow write another book, a fictional rebuke in which Amazing Amy celebrated the most fantastic, fulfilling, bump-free little marriage ever … because she put her mind to it .