Gillian Flynn - Gone Girl:

“Flowers or … something,” she continued. “So I didn’t think, I just flung open the door. And there he stood, Desi, with this look on his face. Determined. As if he’d been girding himself up for this all along. And I was holding the handle … to the Judy puppet. Did you find the puppets?” She smiled up at me tearily. She looked so sweet.

“Oh, I found everything you left for me, Amy.”

“I had just found the handle to the Judy puppet—it had fallen off—I was holding it when I opened the door, and I tried to hit him, and we struggled, and he clubbed me with it. Hard. And the next thing I knew …”

“You had framed me for murder and disappeared.”

“I can explain everything, Nick.”

I stared at her a long hard moment. I saw days under the hot sun stretched across the sand of the beach, her hand on my chest, and I saw family dinners at her parents’ house, with Rand always refilling my glass and patting me on the shoulder, and I saw us sprawled on the rug in my crummy New York apartment, talking while staring at the lazy ceiling fan, and I saw mother of my child and the stunning life I’d planned for us once. I had a moment that lasted two beats, one, two , when I wished violently that she were telling the truth.

“I actually don’t think you can explain everything,” I said. “But I am going to love watching you try.”

“Try me now.”

She tried to take my hand, and I flung her off. I walked away from her, took a breath, and then turned to face her. My wife must always be faced.

“Go ahead, Nick. Try me now.”

“Okay, sure. Why was every clue of the treasure hunt hidden in a place where I had … relations with Andie?”

She sighed, looked at the floor. Her ankles were raw. “I didn’t even know about Andie until I saw it on TV … while I was tied to Desi’s bed, hidden away in his lake house.”

“So that was all … coincidence?”

“Those were all places that were meaningful to us,” she said. A tear slid down her face. “Your office, where you reignited your passion for journalism.”

I snuffed.

“Hannibal, where I finally understood how much this area means to you. Your father’s house—confronting the man who hurt you so much. Your mother’s house, which is now Go’s house, the two people who made you such a good man. But … I guess it doesn’t surprise me that you’d like to share those places with someone you”—she bowed her head—“had fallen in love with. You always liked repeats.”

“Why did each of those places end up including clues that implicated me in your murder? Women’s undies, your purse, your diary . Explain your diary , Amy, with all the lies.”

She just smiled and shook her head like she was sorry for me. “Everything, I can explain everything,” she said.

I looked in that sweet tear-stained face. Then I looked down at all the blood. “Amy. Where’s Desi?”

She shook her head again, a sad little smile.

I moved to call the police, but a knock on our door told me they were already here.

AMY ELLIOTT DUNNE

THE NIGHT OF THE RETURN

I still have Desi’s semen inside me from the last time he raped me, so the medical examination goes fine. My rope-wreathed wrists, my damaged vagina, my bruises—the body I present them is textbook. An older male doctor with humid breath and thick fingers performs the pelvic exam—scraping and wheezing in time—while Detective Rhonda Boney holds my hand. It is like being clutched by a cold bird claw. Not comforting at all. Once she breaks into a grin when she thinks I’m not looking. She is absolutely thrilled that Nick isn’t a bad guy after all. Yes, the women of America are collectively sighing.

Police have been dispatched to Desi’s home, where they’ll find him naked and drained, a stunned look on his face, a few strands of my hair in his clutches, the bed soaked in blood. The knife I used on him, and on my bonds, will be nearby on the floor where I dropped it, dazed, and walked barefoot, carrying nothing out of the house but his keys—to the car, to the gate—and climbed, still slick with his blood, into his vintage Jaguar and returned like some long-lost faithful pet, straight back home to my husband. I’d been reduced to an animal state; I didn’t think of anything but getting back to Nick.

The old doctor tells me the good news; no permanent damage and no need for a D&C—I miscarried too early. Boney keeps clutching my hand and murmuring, My God, what you’ve been through, do you think you feel up to answering a few questions? That fast, from condolences to brass tacks. I find ugly women are usually overly deferential or incredibly rude.

You are Amazing Amy, and you’ve survived a brutal kidnapping involving repeated assaults. You’ve killed your captor, and you’ve made it back to a husband you’ve discovered was cheating. You:

a) Put yourself first and demand some time alone to collect yourself.

b) Hold it together just a little longer so you can help the police.

c) Decide which interview to give first—you might as well get something out of the ordeal, like a book deal.

Answer: B. Amazing Amy always puts others first.

I’m allowed to clean myself up in a private room in the hospital, and I change into a set of clothes Nick put together for me from the house—jeans with creases from being folded too long, a pretty blouse that smells of dust. Boney and I drive from the hospital to the police station in near silence. I ask weakly after my parents.

“They’re waiting for you at the station,” Boney says. “They wept when I told them. With joy. Absolute joy and relief. We’ll let them get some good hugs in with you before we do our questions, don’t worry.”

The cameras are already at the station. The parking lot has that hopeful, overlit look of a sports stadium. There is no underground parking, so we have to pull right up front as the madding crowd closes in: I see wet lips and spittle as everyone screams questions, the pops of flashbulbs and camera lights. The crowd pushes and pulls en masse, jerking a few inches to the right, then the left, as everyone tries to reach me.

“I can’t do this,” I say to Boney. A man’s meaty palm smacks against the car window as a photographer tries to keep his balance. I grab her cold hand. “It’s too much.”

She pats me and says, wait . The station doors open, and every officer in the building files down the stairs and forms a line on either side of me, holding the press back, creating an honor guard for me, and Rhonda and I run in holding hands like reverse newlyweds, rushing straight up to my parents who are waiting just inside the doorway, and everyone gets the photos of us clutching each other with my mom whispering sweetgirlsweetgirlsweetgirl and my dad sobbing so loudly he almost chokes.

There is more whisking away of me, as if I haven’t been whisked away quite enough already. I am deposited in a closet of a room with comfortable but cheap office chairs, the kind that always seem to have bits of old food woven into the fabric. A camera blinking up in the corner and no windows. It is not what I pictured. It is not designed to make me feel safe.

I am surrounded by Boney, her partner, Gilpin, and two FBI agents up from St. Louis who remain nearly silent. They give me water, and then Boney starts.

B: Okay, Amy, first we have to thank you sincerely for talking with us after what you’ve been through. In a case like this, it’s very important to get everything down while the memory is fresh. You can’t imagine how important that is. So it’s good to talk now. If we can get all these details down, we can close the case, and you and Nick can go back to your lives.