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

Part Three: Boy Gets Girl Back (Or Vice Versa)
Nick Dunne: Forty Days Gone
Amy Elliott Dunne: The Night of the Return
Nick Dunne: The Night of the Return
Amy Elliott Dunne: The Night of the Return
Nick Dunne: The Night of the Return
Amy Elliott Dunne: Five Days after the Return
Nick Dunne: Thirty Days after the Return
Amy Elliott Dunne: Eight Weeks after the Return
Nick Dunne: Nine Weeks after the Return
Amy Elliott Dunne: Ten Weeks after the Return
Nick Dunne: Twenty Weeks after the Return
Amy Elliott Dunne: Ten Months, Two Weeks, Six Days after
the Return
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Also by Gillian Flynn
Copyright

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Love is the world’s infinite mutability; lies, hatred, murder
even, are all knit up in it; it is the inevitable blossoming of its
opposites, a magnificent rose smelling faintly of blood.
Tony Kushner, 
THE ILLUSION

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PART ONE
BOY LOSES GIRL

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NICK DUNNE
THE DAY OF
W
hen I think of my wife, I always think of her head. The
shape of it, to begin with. The very first time I saw her, it
was the back of the head I saw, and there was something
lovely about it, the angles of it. Like a shiny, hard corn
kernel or a riverbed fossil. She had what the Victorians
would call 
a finely shaped head
. You could imagine the
skull quite easily.
I’d know her head anywhere.
And what’s inside it. I think of that, too: her mind. Her
brain, all those coils, and her thoughts shuttling through
those coils like fast, frantic centipedes. Like a child, I
picture opening her skull, unspooling her brain and sifting
through it, trying to catch and pin down her thoughts. 
What
are you thinking, Amy?
The question I’ve asked most often
during our marriage, if not out loud, if not to the person who
could answer. I suppose these questions stormcloud over
every marriage: 
What are you thinking? How are you
feeling? Who are you? What have we done to each other?
What will we do?
My eyes flipped open at exactly six a.m. This was no avian
fluttering of the lashes, no gentle blink toward
consciousness. The awakening was mechanical. A spooky

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ventriloquist-dummy click of the lids: The world is black and
then, 
showtime!
6-0-0 the clock said – in my face, first thing
I saw. 6-0-0. It felt different. I rarely woke at such a rounded
time. I was a man of jagged risings: 8:43, 11:51, 9:26. My
life was alarmless.
At that exact moment, 6-0-0, the sun climbed over the
skyline of oaks, revealing its full summer angry-God self. Its
reflection flared across the river toward our house, a long,
blaring finger aimed at me through our frail bedroom
curtains. Accusing: 
You have been seen. You will be seen
.
I wallowed in bed, which was our New York bed in our
new house, which we still called 
the new house
, even
though we’d been back here for two years. It’s a rented
house right along the Mississippi River, a house that
screams Suburban Nouveau Riche, the kind of place I
aspired to as a kid from my split-level, shag-carpet side of
town. The kind of house that is immediately familiar: a
generically grand, unchallenging, new, new, new house that
my wife would – and did – detest.
‘Should I remove my soul before I come inside?’ Her
first line upon arrival. It had been a compromise: Amy
demanded we rent, not buy, in my little Missouri hometown,
in her firm hope that we wouldn’t be stuck here long. But the
only houses for rent were clustered in this failed
development: a miniature ghost town of bank-owned,
recession-busted, 
price-reduced 
mansions, 
a
neighborhood that closed before it ever opened. It was a
compromise, but Amy didn’t see it that way, not in the least.
To Amy, it was a punishing whim on my part, a nasty,
selfish twist of the knife. I would drag her, caveman-style, to
a town she had aggressively avoided, and make her live in

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the kind of house she used to mock. I suppose it’s not a
compromise if only one of you considers it such, but that
was what our compromises tended to look like. One of us
was always angry. Amy, usually.
Do not blame me for this particular grievance, Amy.
The Missouri Grievance. Blame the economy, blame bad
luck, blame my parents, blame your parents, blame the
Internet, blame people who use the Internet. I used to be a
writer. I was a writer who wrote about TV and movies and
books. Back when people read things on paper, back when
anyone cared about what I thought. I’d arrived in New York
in the late ’90s, the last gasp of the glory days, although no
one knew it then. New York was packed with writers, real
writers, because there were magazines, real magazines,
loads of them. This was back when the Internet was still
some exotic pet kept in the corner of the publishing world –
throw some kibble at it, watch it dance on its little leash, oh
quite cute, it definitely won’t kill us in the night. Think about
it: a time when newly graduated college kids could come to
New York and