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

AMY ELLIOTT DUNNE
EIGHT WEEKS AFTER THE RETURN
N
o one has arrested me. The police have stopped
questioning. I feel safe. I will be even safer very soon.
This is how good I feel: Yesterday I came downstairs
for breakfast, and the jar that held my vomit was sitting on
the kitchen counter, empty. Nick – the scrounger – had
gotten rid of that little bit of leverage. I blinked an eye, and
then I tossed out the jar.
It hardly matters now.
Good things are happening.
I have a book deal: I am officially in control of our story.
It feels wonderfully symbolic. Isn’t that what every marriage
is, anyway? Just a lengthy game of he-said, she-said?
Well, 
she
is saying, and the world will listen, and Nick will
have to smile and agree. I will write him the way I want him
to be: romantic and thoughtful and very very repentant –
about the credit cards and the purchases and the
woodshed. If I can’t get him to say it out loud, he’ll say it in
my book. Then he’ll come on tour with me and smile and
smile.
I’m calling the book simply: 
Amazing
. Causing great
wonder or surprise; astounding. That sums up my story, I
think.

---

NICK DUNNE
NINE WEEKS AFTER THE RETURN
I
found the vomit. She’d hidden it in the back of the freezer
in a jar, inside a box of Brussels sprouts. The box was
covered in icicles; it must have been sitting there for
months. I know it was her own joke with herself: 
Nick won’t
eat his vegetables, Nick never cleans out the fridge, Nick
won’t think to look here
.
But Nick did.
Nick knows how to clean out the refrigerator, it turns
out, and Nick even knows how to defrost: I poured all that
sick down the drain, and I left the jar on the counter so she’d
know.
She tossed it in the garbage. She never said a word
about it.
Something’s wrong. I don’t know what it is, but
something’s very wrong.
My life has begun to feel like an epilogue. Tanner picked up
a new case: A Nashville singer discovered his wife was
cheating, and her body was found the next day in a
Hardee’s trash bin near their house, a hammer covered
with his fingerprints beside her. Tanner is using me as a
defense. 
I know it looks bad, but it also looked bad for
Nick Dunne, and you know how that turned out
. I could

---

almost feel him winking at me through the camera lens. He
sent the occasional text: 
U OK?
Or: 
Anything?
No, nothing.
Boney and Go and I hung out in secret at the Pancake
House, where we sifted the dirty sand of Amy’s story, trying
to find something we could use. We scoured the diary, an
elaborate anachronism hunt. It came down to desperate
nitpickings like: ‘She makes a comment here about Darfur,
was that on the radar in 2010?’ (Yes, we found a 2006
newsclip with George Clooney discussing it.) Or my own
best worst: ‘Amy makes a joke in the July 2008 entry about
killing a hobo, but I feel like dead-hobo jokes weren’t big
until 2009.’ To which Boney replied: ‘Pass the syrup,
freakshow.’
People peeled away, went on with their lives. Boney
stayed. Go stayed.
Then something happened. My father finally died. At night,
in his sleep. A woman spooned his last meal into his
mouth, a woman settled him into bed for his last rest, a
woman cleaned him up after he died, and a woman phoned
to give me the news.
‘He was a good man,’ she said, dullness with an
obligatory injection of empathy.
‘No, he wasn’t,’ I said, and she laughed like she clearly
hadn’t in a month.
I thought it would make me feel better to have the man
vanished from the earth, but I actually felt a massive,
frightening hollowness open up in my chest. I had spent my
life comparing myself to my father, and now he was gone,
and there was only Amy left to bat against. After the small,

---

dusty, lonely service, I didn’t leave with Go, I went home with
Amy, and I clutched her to me. That’s right, I went home with
my wife.
I have to get out of this house
, I thought. 
I have to be
done with Amy once and for all
. Burn us down, so I couldn’t
ever go back.
Who would I be without you?
I had to find out. I had to tell my own story. It was all so
clear.
The next morning, as Amy was in her study clicking away at
the keys, telling the world her 
Amazing
story, I took my
laptop downstairs and stared at the glowing white screen.
I started on the opening page of my own book.
I am a cheating, weak-spined, woman-fearing coward,
and I am the hero of your story. Because the woman I
cheated on – my wife, Amy Elliott Dunne – is a sociopath
and a murderer
.
Yes. I’d read that.

---