Gillian Flynn - Gone Girl:

Nick fastened me to the earth. Nick wasn’t like Desi, who brought me things I wanted (tulips, wine) to make me do the things he wanted (love him). Nick just wanted me to be happy, that’s all, very pure. Maybe I mistook that for laziness. I just want you to be happy, Amy . How many times did he say that and I took it to mean: I just want you to be happy, Amy, because that’s less work for me . But maybe I was unfair. Well, not unfair but confused. No one I’ve loved has ever not had an agenda. So how could I know?

It really is true. It took this awful situation for us to realize it. Nick and I fit together. I am a little too much, and he is a little too little. I am a thornbush, bristling from the overattention of my parents, and he is a man of a million little fatherly stab wounds, and my thorns fit perfectly into them.

I need to get home to him.

NICK DUNNE

FOURTEEN DAYS GONE

I woke up on my sister’s couch with a raging hangover and an urge to kill my wife. This was fairly common in the days after the Diary Interview with the police. I’d imagine finding Amy tucked away in some spa on the West Coast, sipping pineapple juice on a divan, her cares floating way, far away, above a perfect blue sky, and me, dirty, smelly from an urgent cross-country drive, standing in front of her, blocking the sun until she looks up, and then my hands around her perfect throat, with its cords and hollows and the pulse thumping first urgently and then slowly as we look into each other’s eyes and at last have some understanding.

I was going to be arrested. If not today, tomorrow; if not tomorrow, the next day. I had taken the fact that the police let me walk out of the station as a good sign, but Tanner had shut me down: “Without a body, a conviction is incredibly tough. They’re just dotting the I’s, crossing the T’s. Spend these days doing whatever you need to do, because once the arrest happens, we’ll be busy.”

Just outside the window, I could hear the rumbling of camera crews—men greeting one another good morning, as if they were clocking in at the factory. Cameras click-click-clicked like restless locusts, shooting the front of Go’s house. Someone had leaked the discovery of my “man cave” of goods on my sister’s property, my imminent arrest. Neither of us had dared to so much as flick at a curtain.

Go walked into the room in flannel boxers and her high school Butthole Surfers T-shirt, her laptop in the crook of an arm. “Everyone hates you again,” she said.

“Fickle fucks.”

“Last night someone leaked the information about the shed, about Amy’s purse and the diary. Now it’s all: Nick Is a Liar, Nick Is a Killer, Nick Is a Lying Killer . Sharon Schieber just released a statement saying she was very shocked and disappointed with the direction the case was taking. Oh, and everyone knows all about the porn —Kill the Bitches .”

“Hurt the Bitch.”

“Oh, excuse me,” she said. “Hurt the Bitch . So Nick Is a Lying Killer-slash-Sexual Sadist . Ellen Abbott is going to go fucking rabid. She’s a crazy anti-porn lady.”

“Of course she is,” I said. “I’m sure Amy is very aware of that.”

“Nick?” she said in her wake up voice. “This is bad.”

“Go, it doesn’t matter what anyone else thinks, we need to remember that,” I said. “What matters right now is what Amy is thinking. If she’s softening toward me.”

“Nick. You really think she can go that fast from hating you so much to falling in love with you again?”

It was the fifth anniversary of our conversation on this topic.

“Go, yeah, I do. Amy was never a person with any sort of bullshit detector. If you said she looked beautiful, she knew that was a fact. If you said she was brilliant, it wasn’t flattery, it was her due. So yeah, I think a good chunk of her truly believes that if I can only see the error of my ways, of course I’ll be in love with her again. Because why in God’s name wouldn’t I be?”

“And if it turns out she’s developed a bullshit detector?”

“You know Amy; she needs to win. She’s less pissed off that I cheated than that I picked someone else over her. She’ll want me back just to prove that she’s the winner. Don’t you agree? Just seeing me begging her to come back so I can worship her properly, it will be hard for her to resist. Don’t you think?”

“I think it’s a decent idea,” she said in the way you might wish someone good luck on the lottery.

“Hey, if you’ve got something better, by all fucking means.”

We snapped like that at each other now. We’d never done that before. After the police found the woodshed, they grilled Go, hard, just as Tanner had predicted: Did she know? Did she help?

I’d expected her to come home that night, brimming with curse words and fury, but all I got was an embarrassed smile as she slipped past me to her room in the house she had double-mortgaged to cover Tanner’s retainer.

I had put my sister in financial and legal jeopardy because of my shitty decisions. The whole situation made Go feel resentful and me ashamed, a lethal combination for two people trapped in small confines.

I tried a different subject: “I’ve been thinking about phoning Andie now that—”

“Yeah, that would be genius-smart, Nick. Then she can go back on Ellen Abbott— ”

“She didn’t go on Ellen Abbott . She had a press conference that Ellen Abbott carried. She’s not evil, Go.”

“She gave the press conference because she was pissed at you. I sorta wish you’d just kept fucking her.”

“Nice.”

“What would you even say to her?”

“I’m sorry.”

“You are definitely fucking sorry,” she muttered.

“I just— I hate how it ended.”

“The last time you saw Andie, she bit you,” Go said in an overly patient voice. “I don’t think the two of you have anything else to say. You are the prime suspect in a murder investigation. You have forfeited the right to a smooth breakup. For fuck’s sake, Nick.”

We were growing sick of each other, something I never thought could happen. It was more than basic stress, more than the danger I’d deposited on Go’s doorstep. Those ten seconds just a week ago, when I’d opened the door of the woodshed, expecting Go to read my mind as always, and what Go had read was that I’d killed my wife: I couldn’t get over that, and neither could she. I caught her looking at me now and then with the same steeled chill with which she looked at our father: just another shitty male taking up space. I’m sure I looked at her through our father’s miserable eyes sometimes: just another petty woman resenting me.

I let out a gust of air, stood up, and squeezed her hand, and she squeezed back.

“I think I should head home,” I said. I felt a wave of nausea. “I can’t stand this anymore. Waiting to be arrested, I can’t stand it.”

Before she could stop me, I grabbed my keys, swung open the door, and the cameras began blasting, the shouts exploded from a crowd that was even larger than I’d feared: Hey, Nick, did you kill your wife? Hey, Margo, did you help your brother hide evidence?

“Fucking shitbags,” Go spat. She stood next to me in solidarity, in her Butthole Surfers T-shirt and boxers. A few protesters carried signs. A woman with stringy blond hair and sunglasses shook a poster board: Nick, where is AMY?

The shouts got louder, frantic, baiting my sister: Margo, is your brother a wife killer? Did Nick kill his wife and baby? Margo, are you a suspect? Did Nick kill his wife? Did Nick kill his baby?