Gillian Flynn - Gone Girl:

But I worry. All the time. I know I’m already too old for my husband’s tastes. Because I used to be his ideal, six years ago, and so I’ve heard his ruthless comments about women nearing forty: how pathetic he finds them, overdressed, out at bars, oblivious to their lack of appeal. He’d come back from a night out drinking, and I’d ask him how the bar was, whatever bar, and he’d so often say: “Totally inundated by Lost Causes,” his code for women my age. At the time, a girl barely in her thirties, I’d smirked along with him as if that would never happen to me. Now I am his Lost Cause, and he’s trapped with me, and maybe that’s why he’s so angry.

I’ve been indulging in toddler therapy. I walk over to Noelle’s every day and I let her triplets paw at me. The little plump hands in my hair, the sticky breath on my neck. You can understand why women always threaten to devour children: She is just to eat! I could eat him with a spoon! Although watching her three children toddle to her, sleep-stained from their nap, rubbing their eyes while they make their way to Mama, little hands touching her knee or arm as if she were home base, as if they knew they were safe … it hurts me sometimes to watch.

Yesterday I had a particularly needful afternoon at Noelle’s, so maybe that’s why I did something stupid.

Nick comes home and finds me in the bedroom, fresh from a shower, and pretty soon he is pushing me against the wall, pushing himself inside me. When he is done and releases me, I can see the wet kiss of my mouth against the blue paint. As he sits on the edge of the bed, panting, he says, “Sorry about that. I just needed you.”

Not looking at me.

I go to him and put my arms around him, pretending what we’d just done was normal, a pleasant marital ritual, and I say, “I’ve been thinking.”

“Yeah, what’s that?”

“Well, now might be the right time. To start a family. Try to get pregnant.” I know it’s crazy even as I say it, but I can’t help myself—I have become the crazy woman who wants to get pregnant because it will save her marriage.

It’s humbling, to become the very thing you once mocked.

He jerks away from me. “Now? Now is about the worst time to start a family, Amy. You have no job—”

“I know, but I’d want to stay home with the baby anyway at first—”

“My mom just died, Amy.”

“And this would be new life, a new start.”

He grips me by both arms and looks me right in the eye for the first time in a week. “Amy, I think you think that now that my mom is dead, we’ll just frolic back to New York and have some babies, and you’ll get your old life back. But we don’t have enough money . We barely have enough money for the two of us to live here . You can’t imagine how much pressure I feel, every day, to fix this mess we’re in. To fucking provide . I can’t handle you and me and a few kids. You’ll want to give them everything you had growing up, and I can’t . No private schools for the little Dunnes, no tennis and violin lessons, no summer homes. You’d hate how poor we’d be. You’d hate it.”

“I’m not that shallow, Nick—”

“You really think we’re in a great place right now, to have kids?”

It is the closest we’ve gotten to discussing our marriage, and I can see he already regrets saying something.

“We’re under a lot of pressure, baby,” I say. “We’ve had a few bumps, and I know a lot of it is my fault. I just feel so at loose ends here …”

“So we’re going to be one of those couples who has a kid to fix their marriage? Because that always works out so well.”

“We’ll have a baby because—”

His eyes go dark, canine, and he grabs me by the arms again.

“Just … No, Amy. Not right now. I can’t take one more bit of stress. I can’t handle one more thing to worry about. I am cracking under the pressure. I will snap.”

For once I know he’s telling the truth.

NICK DUNNE

SIX DAYS GONE

The first forty-eight hours are key in any investigation. Amy had been gone, now, almost a week. A candlelight vigil would be held this evening in Tom Sawyer Park, which, according to the press, was “a favorite place of Amy Elliott Dunne’s.” (I’d never known Amy to set foot in the park; despite the name, it is not remotely quaint. Generic, bereft of trees, with a sandbox that’s always full of animal feces; it is utterly un-Twainy.) In the last twenty-four hours, the story had gone national—it was everywhere, just like that.

God bless the faithful Elliotts. Marybeth phoned me last night, as I was trying to recover from the bombshell police interrogation. My mother-in-law had seen the Ellen Abbott show and pronounced the woman “an opportunistic ratings whore.” Nevertheless, we’d spent most of today strategizing how to handle the media.

The media (my former clan, my people!) was shaping its story, and the media loved the Amazing Amy angle and the long-married Elliotts. No snarky commentary on the dismantling of the series or the authors’ near-bankruptcy—right now it was all hearts and flowers for the Elliotts. The media loved them.

Me, not so much. The media was already turning up items of concern . Not only the stuff that had been leaked—my lack of alibi, the possibly “staged” crime scene—but actual personality traits. They reported that back in high school, I’d never dated one girl longer than a few months and thus was clearly a ladies’ man. They found out we had my father in Comfort Hill and that I rarely visited, and thus I was an ingrate dad-abandoner. “It’s a problem—they don’t like you,” Go said after every bit of news coverage. “It’s a real, real problem, Lance.” The media had resurrected my first name, which I’d hated since grade school, stifled at the start of every school year when the teacher called roll: “It’s Nick, I go by Nick!” Every September, an opening-day rite: “Nick-I-go-by-Nick!” Always some smart-ass kid would spend recess parading around like a mincing gallant: “Hi, I’m Laaaance,” in a flowy-shirted voice. Then it would be forgotten again until the following year.

But not now. Now it was all over the news, the dreaded three-name judgment reserved for serial killers and assassins—Lance Nicholas Dunne—and there was no one I could interrupt.

Rand and Marybeth Elliott, Go, and I carpooled to the vigil together. It was unclear how much information the Elliotts were receiving, how many damning updates about their son-in-law. I knew they were aware of the “staged” scene: “I’m going to get some of my own people in there, and they’ll tell us just the opposite—that it clearly was the scene of a struggle,” Rand said confidently. “The truth is malleable; you just need to pick the right expert.”

Rand didn’t know about the other stuff, the credit cards and the life insurance and the blood and Noelle, my wife’s bitter best friend with the damning claims: abuse, greed, fear. She was booked on Ellen Abbott tonight, post-vigil. Noelle and Ellen could be mutually disgusted by me for the viewing audience.

Not everyone was repulsed by me. In the past week, The Bar’s business was booming: Hundreds of customers packed in to sip beers and nibble popcorn at the place owned by Lance Nicholas Dunne, the maybe-killer. Go had to hire four new kids to tend The Bar; she’d dropped by once and said she couldn’t go again, couldn’t stand seeing how packed it was, fucking gawkers, ghouls, all drinking our booze and swapping stories about me. It was disgusting. Still, Go reasoned, the money would be helpful if …

If. Amy gone six days, and we were all thinking in if s.