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

Code rejected
. I tried again. 
Code rejected
. A bead of
sweat rolled down my back. Amy had always threatened to
change the code. She said it was pointless to have one that
was so guessable, but I knew the real reason. She
resented that it was my birthday and not our anniversary:
Once again I’d chosen 
me
over 
us
. My semi-sweet
nostalgia for Amy disappeared. I stabbed my finger at the
numbers again, growing more panicked as the alarm
beeped and beeped and beeped its countdown – until it
went into full intruder blare.
Woooonk-woooonk-woooonk!
My cell phone was supposed to ring so I could give the
all-clear: 
Just me, the idiot
. But it didn’t. I waited a full
minute, the alarm reminding me of a torpedoed-submarine
movie. The canned heat of a closed house in July
shimmered over me. My shirt back was already soaked.
Goddammit, Amy
. I scanned the alarm for the company’s
number and found nothing. I pulled over a chair and began
yanking at the alarm; I had it off the wall, hanging by the
cords, when my phone finally rang. A bitchy voice on the

---

other end demanded Amy’s first pet’s name.
Woooonk-woooonk-woooonk!
It was exactly the wrong tone – smug, petulant, utterly
unconcerned – and exactly the wrong question, because I
didn’t know the answer, which infuriated me. No matter how
many clues I solved, I’d be faced with some Amy trivia to
unman me.
‘Look, this is Nick Dunne, this is my dad’s house, this
account was set up by me,’ I snapped. ‘So it doesn’t really
fucking matter what my wife’s first pet’s name was.’
Woooonk-woooonk-woooonk!
‘Please don’t take that tone with me, sir.’
‘Look, I just came in to grab one thing from my dad’s
house, and now I’m leaving, okay?’
‘I have to notify the police immediately.’
‘Can you just turn off the goddamn alarm so I can
think?’
Woooonk-woooonk-woooonk!
‘The alarm’s off.’
‘The alarm is not off.’
‘Sir, I warned you once, do not take that tone with me.’
You fucking bitch
.
‘You know what? Fuck it, fuck it, 
fuck it
.’
I hung up just as I remembered Amy’s cat’s name, the
very first one: Stuart.
I called back, got a different operator, a reasonable
operator, who turned off the alarm and, God bless her,
called off the police. I really wasn’t in the mood to explain
myself.
I sat on the thin, cheap carpet and made myself
breathe, my heart clattering. After a minute, after my

---

shoulders untensed and my jaw unclenched and my hands
unfisted and my heart returned to normal, I stood up and
momentarily debated just leaving, as if that would teach
Amy a lesson. But as I stood up, I saw a blue envelope left
on the kitchen counter like a Dear John note.
I took a deep breath, blew it out – new attitude – and
opened the envelope, pulled out the letter marked with a
heart.
Hi Darling,
So we both have things we want to work on. For me, it’d be my
perfectionism, my occasional (wishful thinking?) self-righteousness. For you? I
know you worry that you’re sometimes too distant, too removed, unable to be
tender or nurturing. Well, I want to tell you – here in your father’s house – that
isn’t true. You are not your father. You need to know that you are a good man,
you are a sweet man, you are kind. I’ve punished you for not being able to read
my mind sometimes, for not being able to act in exactly the way I wanted you to
act right at exactly that moment. I punished you for being a real, breathing man.
I ordered you around instead of trusting you to find your way. I didn’t give you
the benefit of the doubt: that no matter how much you and I blunder, you
always love me and want me to be happy. And that should be enough for any
girl, right? I worry I’ve said things about you that aren’t actually true, and that
you’ve come to believe them. So I am here to say now: You are WARM. You are
my sun.
If Amy were with me, as she’d planned on being, she
would have nuzzled into me the way she used to do, her
face in the crook of my neck, and she would have kissed
me and smiled and said,