Rating: ★★★★☆ Tags: Mystery Detective, General, Fiction

parted and Jacqueline Collings entered, her lips a tight red
scar, her face powder lined with tears.
‘Where is she?’ she said to me. ‘The lying little bitch,
where is she? She killed my son. My 
son
.’ She began
crying as the reporter snapped a few photos.
How do you feel that your son was accused of kidnap
and rape?
one reporter asked in a stiff voice.
‘How do I 
feel
?’ she snapped. ‘Are you actually
serious? Do people really answer questions like that? That
nasty, 
soulless
girl manipulated my son his entire life –
write this down
– she manipulated and lied and finally
murdered him, and now, even after he’s dead, she’s still
using him—’
‘Ms Collings, we’re Amy’s parents,’ Marybeth was
beginning. She tried to touch Jacqueline on the shoulder,
and Jacqueline shook her off. ‘I am sorry for your pain.’
‘But not my loss.’ Jacqueline stood a good head taller
than Marybeth; she glared down on her. ‘But 
not
my 
loss
,’
she reasserted.
‘I’m sorry about … everything,’ Marybeth said, and then
Rand was next to her, a head taller than Jacqueline.
‘What are you going to do about your daughter?’
Jacqueline asked. She turned toward our young liaison

---

officer, who tried to hold his ground. ‘What is being done
about Amy? Because she is lying when she says my son
kidnapped her. She is lying. She killed him, she 
murdered
him in his sleep, and no one seems to be taking this
seriously.’
‘It’s all being taken very, very seriously, ma’am,’ the
young kid said.
‘Can I get a quote, Ms Collings?’ asked the reporter.
‘I just gave you my quote. 
Amy Elliott Dunne
murdered my son
. It was not self-defense. She 
murdered
him.’
‘Do you have proof of that?’
Of course she didn’t.
The reporter’s story would chronicle my husbandly
exhaustion (
his drawn face telling of too many nights
forfeited to fear
) and the Elliotts’ relief (
the two parents
cling to each other as they wait for their only child to be
officially returned to them
). It would discuss the
incompetence of the cops (
it was a biased case, full of
dead ends and wrong turns, with the police department
focused doggedly on the wrong man
). The article would
dismiss Jacqueline Collings in a single line: 
After an
awkward run-in with the Elliott parents, an embittered
Jacqueline Collings was ushered out of the room,
claiming her son was innocent
.
Jacqueline was indeed ushered out of the room into
another, where her statement would be recorded and she
would be kept out of the way of the much better story: the
Triumphant Return of Amazing Amy.
When Amy was released to us, it all began again. The

---

photos and the tears, the hugging and the laughter, all for
strangers who wanted to see and to know: 
What was it
like? Amy, what does it feel like to escape your captor and
return to your husband? Nick, what does it feel like to get
your wife back, to get your freedom back, all at once?
I remained mostly silent. I was thinking my own
questions, the same questions I’d thought for years, the
ominous refrain of our marriage: 
What are you thinking,
Amy? How are you feeling? Who are you? What have we
done to each other? What will we do?
It was a gracious, queenly act for Amy to want to come
home to our marriage bed with her cheating husband.
Everyone agreed. The media followed us as if we were a
royal wedding procession, the two of us whizzing through
the neon, fast-food-cluttered streets of Carthage to our
McMansion on the river. What grace Amy has, what moxie.
A storybook princess. And I, of course, was the lickspittle
hunchback of a husband who would bow and scrape the
rest of my days. Until she was arrested. If she ever got
arrested.
That she was released at all was a concern. More than
a concern, an utter shock. I saw them all filing out of the
conference room where they questioned her for 
four
hours
and then let her go: two FBI guys with alarmingly short hair
and blank faces; Gilpin, looking like he’d swallowed the
greatest steak dinner of his life; and Boney, the only one
with thin, tight lips and a little V of a frown. She glanced at
me as she walked past, arched an eyebrow, and was gone.
Then, too quickly, Amy and I were back in our home,
alone in the living room, Bleecker watching us with shiny

---

eyes. Outside our curtains, the lights of the TV cameras
remained, bathing our living room in a bizarrely lush orange
glow. We looked candlelit, romantic. Amy was absolutely
beautiful. I hated her. I was afraid of her.
‘We can’t really sleep in the same house—’ I began.
‘I want to stay here with you.’ She took my hand. ‘I want
to be with my husband. I want to give you the chance to be
the kind of husband you want to be. I forgive you.’
‘ Yo u 
forgive
me? Amy, why did you come back?
Because of what I said in the interviews? The videos?’
‘Wasn’t that what you wanted?’ she said. ‘Wasn’t that
the point of the videos? They were perfect – they reminded
me of what we used to have, how special it was.’
‘What I said, that was just me saying what you wanted
to hear.’
‘I know – that’s how well you know me!’ Amy said. She
beamed. Bleecker began figure-eighting between her legs.
She picked him up and stroked him. His purr was
deafening. ‘Think about it, Nick, we 
know
each other. Better
than anyone in the world now.’
It was true that I’d had this feeling too, in the past
month, when I wasn’t wishing Amy harm. It would come to
me at strange moments – in the middle of the night, up to
take a piss, or in the morning pouring a bowl of cereal – I’d
detect a nib of admiration, and more than that, fondness for
my wife, right in the middle of me, right in the gut. To know
exactly what I wanted to hear in those notes, to woo me
back to her, even to predict all my wrong moves … the
woman knew me cold. Better than anyone in the world, she
knew me. All this time I’d thought we were strangers, and it
turned out we knew each other intuitively, in our bones, in

---

our blood.
It was kind of romantic. Catastrophically romantic.
‘We can’t just pick up where we were, Amy.’
‘No, not where we were,’ she said. ‘Where we are
now. Where you love me and you’ll never do wrong again.’
‘You’re crazy, you’re literally crazy if you think I’m going
to stay. You 
killed
a man,’ I said. I turned my back to her,
and then I pictured her with a knife in her hand and her
mouth growing tight as I disobeyed her. I turned back
around. Yes, my wife must always be faced.
‘To escape him.’
‘You killed Desi so you had a new story, so you could
come back and be beloved Amy and not ever have to take
the blame for what you did. Don’t you get it, Amy, the irony?
It’s what you always hated about me – that I never dealt with
the consequences of my actions, right? Well, my ass has
been well and duly consequenced. So what about you? You