Gillian Flynn - Gone Girl:

I stood, trying to hold my ground, refusing to let myself step back into the house. Suddenly, Go was crouching behind me, cranking the spigot near the steps. She turned on the hose full-bore—a hard, steady jet—and blasted all those cameramen and protesters and pretty journalists in their TV-ready suits, sprayed them like animals.

She was giving me covering fire. I shot into my car and tore off, leaving them dripping on the front lawn, Go laughing shrilly.

It took ten minutes for me to nudge my car from my driveway into my garage, inching my way slowly, slowly forward, parting the angry ocean of human beings—there were at least twenty protesters in front of my home, in addition to the camera crews. My neighbor Jan Teverer was one of them. She and I made eye contact, and she aimed her poster at me: WHERE IS AMY, NICK?

Finally, I was inside, and the garage door came buzzing down. I sat in the heat of the concrete space, breathing.

Everywhere felt like a jail now—doors opening and closing and opening and closing, and me never feeling safe.

I spent the rest of my day picturing how I’d kill Amy. It was all I could think of: finding a way to end her. Me smashing in Amy’s busy, busy brain. I had to give Amy her due: I may have been dozing the past few years, but I was fucking wide awake now. I was electric again, like I had been in the early days of our marriage.

I wanted to do something, make something happen, but there was nothing to be done. By late evening, the camera crews were all gone, though I couldn’t risk leaving the house. I wanted to walk. I settled for pacing. I was wired dangerously tight.

Andie had screwed me over, Marybeth had turned against me, Go had lost a crucial measure of faith. Boney had trapped me. Amy had destroyed me. I poured a drink. I took a slug, tightened my fingers around the curves of the tumbler, then hurled it at the wall, watched the glass burst into fireworks, heard the tremendous shatter, smelled the cloud of bourbon. Rage in all five senses. Those fucking bitches .

I’d tried all my life to be a decent guy, a man who loved and respected women, a guy without hang-ups. And here I was, thinking nasty thoughts about my twin, about my mother-in-law, about my mistress. I was imagining bashing in my wife’s skull.

A knock came at the door, a loud, furious bang-bang-bang that rattled me out of my nightmare brain.

I opened the door, flung it wide, greeting fury with fury.

It was my father, standing on my doorstep like some awful specter summoned by my hatefulness. He was breathing heavily and sweating. His shirtsleeve was torn and his hair was wild, but his eyes had their usual dark alertness that made him seem viciously sane.

“Is she here?” he snapped.

“Who, Dad, who are you looking for?”

“You know who.” He pushed past me, started marching through the living room, trailing mud, his hands balled, his gravity far forward, forcing him to keep walking or fall down, muttering bitchbitchbitch . He smelled of mint. Real mint, not manufactured, and I saw a smear of green on his trousers, as if he’d been stomping through someone’s garden.

Little bitch that little bitch , he kept muttering. Through the dining room, into the kitchen, flipping on lights. A waterbug scuttled up the wall.

I followed him, trying to get him to calm down, Dad, Dad, why don’t you sit down, Dad, do you want a glass of water, Dad … He stomped downstairs, clumps of mud falling off his shoes. My hands turtled into fists. Of course this bastard would show up and actually make things worse.

“Dad! Goddammit, Dad! No one is here but me. Just me.” He flung open the guest room door, then went back up to the living room, ignoring me—“Dad!”

I didn’t want to touch him. I was afraid I’d hit him. I was afraid I’d cry.

I blocked him as he tried to go upstairs to the bedroom. I placed one hand on the wall, one on the banister—human barricade. “Dad! Look at me.”

His words came out in a furious spittle. “You tell her, you tell that little ugly bitch it’s not over. She’s not better than me, you tell her. She’s not too good for me. She doesn’t get to have a say . That ugly bitch will have to learn—”

I swear I saw a blank whiteness for just a second, a moment of complete, jarring clarity. I stopped trying to block my father’s voice for once and let it throb in my ears. I was not that man: I didn’t hate and fear all women. I was a one-woman misogynist. If I despised only Amy, focused all my fury and rage and venom on the one woman who deserved it, that didn’t make me my father. That made me sane.

Little bitch little bitch little bitch .

I had never hated my father more for making me truly love those words.

Fucking bitch fucking bitch .

I grabbed him by the arm, hard, and herded him into the car, slammed the door. He repeated the incantation all the way to Comfort Hill. I pulled up to the home in the entry reserved for ambulances, and I went to his side, swung open the door, yanked him out by the arm, and walked him just inside the doors.

Then I turned my back and went home.

Fucking bitch fucking bitch .

But there was nothing I could do except beg. My bitch wife had left me with nothing but my sorry dick in my hand, begging her to come home. Print, online, TV, wherever, all I could do was hope my wife saw me playing good husband, saying the words she wanted me to say: capitulation, complete. You are right and I am wrong, always. Come home to me (you fucking cunt). Come home so I can kill you .

AMY ELLIOTT DUNNE

TWENTY-SIX DAYS GONE

Desi is here again. He is here almost every day now, simpering around the house, standing in the kitchen as the setting sun lights up his profile so I can admire it, pulling me by the hand into the tulip room so I can thank him again, reminding me how safe and loved I am.

He says I’m safe and loved even though he won’t let me leave, which doesn’t make me feel safe and loved. He’s left me no car keys. Nor house keys nor the gate security code. I am literally a prisoner—the gate is fifteen feet high, and there are no ladders in the house (I’ve looked). I could, I suppose, drag several pieces of furniture over to the wall, pile them up, and climb over, drop to the other side, limp or crawl away, but that’s not the point. The point is, I am his valued, beloved guest, and a guest should be able to leave when she wants. I brought this up a few days ago. “What if I need to leave. Immediately?”

“Maybe I should move in here,” he counters. “Then I could be here all the time and keep you safe, and if anything happens, we could leave together.”

“What if your mom gets suspicious and comes up here and you’re found hiding me? It would be awful.”

His mother. I would die if his mother came up here, because she would report me immediately. The woman despises me, all because of that incident back in high school—so long ago, and she still holds a grudge. I scratched up my face and told Desi she attacked me (the woman was so possessive, and so cold to me, she might as well have). They didn’t talk for a month. Clearly, they’ve made up.

“Jacqueline doesn’t know the code,” he says. “This is my lake house.” He pauses and pretends to think. “I really should move up here. It’s not healthy for you to spend so many hours by yourself.”

But I’m not by myself, not that much. We have a bit of a routine established in just two weeks. It’s a routine mandated by Desi, my posh jailer, my spoiled courtier. Desi arrives just after noon, always smelling of some expensive lunch he’s devoured with Jacqueline at some white-linened restaurant, the kind of restaurant he could take me to if we moved to Greece. (This is the other option he repeatedly presents: We could move to Greece. For some reason, he believes I will never be identified in a tiny little fishing village in Greece where he has summered many times, and where I know he pictures us sipping the wine, making lazy sunset love, our bellies full of octopus.) He smells of lunch as he enters, he wafts it. He must dab goose liver behind his ears (the way his mother always smelled vaguely vaginal—food and sex, the Collings reek of, not a bad strategy).