Gillian Flynn - Gone Girl:

“You’re at the end of your rope. Emotionally.”

Nick looks right at the camera. “I want my wife. I want her to be right here.” He takes a breath. “I’m not the best at showing emotion. I know that. But I love her. I need her to be okay. She has to be okay. I have so much to make up to her.”

“Like what?”

He laughs, the chagrined laugh that even now I find appealing. In better days, I used to call it the talk-show laugh: It was the quick downward glance, the scratching of a corner of the mouth with a casual thumb, the inhaled chuckle that a charming movie star always deploys right before telling a killer story.

“Like, none of your business.” He smiles. “I just have a lot to make up to her. I wasn’t the husband I could have been. We had a few hard years, and I … I lost my shit. I stopped trying. I mean, I’ve heard that phrase a thousand times: We stopped trying . Everyone knows it means the end of a marriage—it’s textbook. But I stopped trying. It was me. I wasn’t the man I needed to be.” Nick’s lids are heavy, his speech off-kilter enough that his twang is showing. He is past tipsy, one drink before drunk. His cheeks are pink with alcohol. My fingertips glow, remembering the heat of his skin when he had a few cocktails in him.

“So how would you make it up to her?” The camera wobbles for a second; the girl is grabbing her drink.

“How will I make it up to her. First I’m going to find her and bring her home. You can bet on that. Then? Whatever she needs from me, I’ll give her. From now on. Because I reached the end of the treasure hunt, and I was brought to my knees. Humbled. My wife has never been more clear to me than she is now. I’ve never been so sure of what I needed to do.”

“If you could talk to Amy right now, what would you tell her?”

“I love you. I will find you. I will … ”

I can tell he is about to do the Daniel Day-Lewis line from The Last of the Mohicans : “Stay alive … I will find you.” He can’t resist deflecting any sincerity with a quick line of movie dialogue. I can feel him teetering right on the edge of it. He stops himself.

“I love you forever, Amy.”

How heartfelt. How unlike my husband.

Three morbidly obese hill people on motorized scooters are between me and my morning coffee. Their asses mushroom over the sides of the contraptions, but they still need another Egg McMuffin. There are literally three people, parked in front of me, in line, inside the McDonald’s.

I actually don’t care. I’m curiously cheerful despite this twist in the plan. Online, the video is already spiral-viraling away, and the reaction is surprisingly positive. Cautiously optimistic: Maybe this guy didn’t kill his wife after all . That is, word for word, the most common refrain. Because once Nick lets his guard down and shows some emotion, it’s all there. No one could watch that video and believe he was putting up an act. It was no swallow-the-pain sort of amateur theater. My husband loves me. Or at least last night he loved me. While I was plotting his doom in my crummy little cabin that smells of moldy towel, he loved me.

It’s not enough. I know that, of course. I can’t change my plan. But it gives me pause. My husband has finished the treasure hunt and he is in love. He is also deeply distressed: on one cheek I swear I could spot a hive.

I pull up to my cabin to find Dorothy knocking on my door. Her hair is wet from the heat, brushed straight back like a Wall Street slickster’s. She is in the habit of swiping her upper lip, then licking the sweat off her fingers, so she has her index finger in her mouth like a buttery corncob as she turns to me.

“There she is,” she says. “The truant.”

I am late on my cabin payment. Two days. It almost makes me laugh: I am late on rent.

“I’m so sorry, Dorothy. I’ll come by with it in ten minutes.”

“I’ll wait, if you don’t mind.”

“I’m not sure if I’m going to stay. I might have to head on.”

“Then you’d still owe me the two days. Eighty dollars, please.”

I duck into my cabin, undo my flimsy money belt. I counted my cash on my bed this morning, taking a good long time doling out each bill, a teasing economic striptease, and the big reveal was that I have, somehow , I have only $8,849 left. It costs a lot to live.

When I open the door to hand Dorothy the cash ($8,769 left), I see Greta and Jeff hanging out on Greta’s porch, watching the cash exchange hands. Jeff isn’t playing his guitar, Greta isn’t smoking. They seem to be standing on her porch just to get a better look at me. They both wave at me, hey, sweetie , and I wave limply back. I close the door and start packing.

It’s strange how little I own in this world when I used to own so much. I don’t own an eggbeater or a soup bowl. I own sheets and towels, but I don’t own a decent blanket. I own a pair of scissors so I can keep my hair butchered. It makes me smile because Nick didn’t own a pair of scissors when we moved in together. No scissors, no iron, no stapler, and I remember asking him how he thought he was possibly civilized without a pair of scissors, and he said of course he wasn’t and swooped me up in his arms and threw me on the bed and pounced on top of me, and I laughed because I was still Cool Girl. I laughed instead of thinking about what it meant.

One should never marry a man who doesn’t own a decent set of scissors. That would be my advice. It leads to bad things.

I fold and pack my clothes in my tiny backpack—the same three outfits I bought and kept in my getaway car a month ago so I didn’t have to take anything from home. Toss in my travel toothbrush, calendar, comb, lotion, the sleeping pills I bought, back when I was going to drug and drown myself. My cheap swimsuits. It takes such little time, the whole thing.

I put on my latex gloves and wipe down everything. I pull out the drains to get any trapped hair. I don’t really think Greta and Jeff know who I am, but if they do, I don’t want to leave any proof, and the whole time I say to myself, This is what you get for relaxing, this is what you get for not thinking all the time, all the time. You deserve to get caught, a girl who acts so stupidly, and what if you left hairs in the front office, then what, and what if there are fingerprints in Jeff’s car or Greta’s kitchen, what then, why did you ever think you could be someone who didn’t worry? I picture the police scouring the cabins, finding nothing, and then, like a movie, I go in for a close-up of one lone mousy hair of mine, drifting along the concrete floor of the pool, waiting to damn me.

Then my mind swings the other way: Of course no one is going to show up to look for you here . All the police have to go on is the claim of a few grifters that they saw the real Amy Elliott Dunne at a cheap broke-down cabin court in the middle of nowhere. Little people wanting to feel bigger, that’s what they’d assume.

An assertive knock at the door. The kind a parent gives right before swinging the door wide: I own this place . I stand in the middle of my room and debate not answering. Bang bang bang. I understand now why so many horror movies use that device—the mysterious knock on the door—because it has the weight of a nightmare. You don’t know what’s out there, yet you know you’ll open it. You’ll think what I think: No one bad ever knocks .

Hey, sweetheart, we know you’re home, open up!

I strip off my latex gloves, open the door, and Jeff and Greta are standing on my porch, the sun to their backs, their features in shadow.

“Hey, pretty lady, can we come in?” Jeff asks.