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

AMY ELLIOTT DUNNE
TEN WEEKS AFTER THE RETURN
N
ick still pretends with me. We pretend together that we
are happy and carefree and in love. But I hear him clicking
away late at night on the computer. Writing. Writing his
side, I know it. I 
know
it, I can tell by the feverish outpouring
of words, the keys clicking and clacking like a million
insects. I try to hack in when he’s asleep (although he
sleeps like me now, fussy and anxious, and I sleep like
him). But he’s learned his lesson, that he’s no longer
beloved Nicky, safe from wrong – he no longer uses his
birthday or his mom’s birthday or Bleecker’s birthday as a
password. I can’t get in.
Still, I hear him typing, rapidly and without pause, and I
can picture him hunched over the keyboard, his shoulders
up, his tongue clamped between his teeth, and I know that I
was right to protect myself. To take my precaution.
Because he isn’t writing a love story.

---

NICK DUNNE
TWENTY WEEKS AFTER THE RETURN
I
didn’t move out. I wanted this all to be a surprise to my
wife, who is never surprised. I wanted to give her the
manuscript as I walked out the door to land a book deal.
Let her feel that trickling horror of knowing the world is
about to tilt and dump its shit all over you, and you can’t do
anything about it. No, she may never go to prison, and it will
always be my word against hers, but my case was
convincing. It had an emotional resonance, if not a legal
one.
So let everyone take sides. Team Nick, Team Amy.
Turn it into even more of a game: Sell some fucking T-
shirts.
My legs were weak when I went to tell Amy: I was no longer
part of her story.
I showed her the manuscript, displayed the glaring title:
Psycho Bitch
. A little inside joke. We both like our inside
jokes. I waited for her to scratch my cheeks, rip my clothes,
bite me.
‘Oh! What perfect timing,’ she said cheerfully, and
gave me a big grin. ‘Can I show you something?’
I made her do it again in front of me. Piss on the stick, me

---

squatting next to her on the bathroom floor, watching the
urine come out of her and hitting the stick and turning it
pregnant-blue.
Then I hustled her into the car and drove to the doctor’s
office, and I watched the blood come out of her – because
she isn’t really afraid of blood – and we waited the two
hours for the test to come back.
Amy was pregnant.
‘It’s obviously not mine,’ I said.
‘Oh, it is.’ She smiled back. She tried to snuggle into
my arms. ‘Congratulations, Dad.’
‘Amy—’I began, because of course it wasn’t true, I
hadn’t touched my wife since her return. Then I saw it: the
box of tissues, the vinyl recliner, the TV and porn, and my
semen in a hospital freezer somewhere. I’d left that will-
destroy notice on the table, a limp guilt trip, and then the
notice disappeared, because my wife had taken action, as
always, and that action wasn’t to get rid of the stuff but to
save it. Just in case.
I felt a giant bubble of joy – I couldn’t help it – and then
the joy was encased in a metallic terror.
‘I’ll need to do a few things for my security, Nick,’ she
said. ‘Just because, I have to say, it’s almost impossible to
trust you. To start, you’ll have to delete your book, obviously.
And just to put that other matter to rest, we’ll need an
affidavit, and you’ll need to swear that it was you who
bought the stuff in the woodshed and 
hid
the stuff in the
woodshed, and that you did once think I was framing you,
but 
now
you love me and I love you and everything is good.’
‘What if I refuse?’
She put her hand on her small, swollen belly and

---

frowned. ‘I think that would be awful.’
We had spent years battling for control of our
marriage, of our love story, our life story. I had been
thoroughly, finally outplayed. I created a manuscript, and
she created a life.
I could fight for custody, but I already knew I’d lose.
Amy would relish the battle – God knew what she already
had lined up. By the time she was done, I wouldn’t even be
an every-other-weekend dad; I would interact with my child
in strange rooms with a guardian nearby sipping coffee,
watching me. Or maybe not even that. I could suddenly see
the accusations – of molestation or abuse – and I would
never see my baby, and I would know that my child was
tucked away far from me, Mother whispering, whispering
lies into that tiny pink ear.
‘It’s a boy, by the way,’ she said.
I was a prisoner after all. Amy had me forever, or as
long as she wanted, because I needed to save my son, to
try to unhook, unlatch, debarb, undo everything that Amy
did. I would literally lay down my life for my child, and do it
happily. I would raise my son to be a good man.
I deleted my story.
Boney picked up on the first ring.
‘Pancake House? Twenty minutes?’ she said.
‘No.’
I informed Rhonda Boney that I was going to be a
father and so could no longer assist in any investigation –
that I was, in fact, planning to retract any statement I’d made
concerning my misplaced belief that my wife had framed
me, and I was, also ready to admit my role in the credit

---

cards.
A long pause on the line. ‘Hunh,’ she said. ‘Hunh.’
I could picture Boney running her hand through her
slack hair, chewing on the inside of her cheek.
‘You take care of yourself, okay, Nick?’ she said finally.
‘Take good care of the little one too.’ Then she laughed.
‘Amy I don’t really give a fuck about.’
I went to Go’s house to tell her in person. I tried to
frame it as happy news. A baby, you can’t be that upset
about a baby. You can hate a situation, but you can’t hate a
child.
I thought Go was going to hit me. She stood so close I
could feel her breath. She jabbed me with an index finger.
‘You just want an excuse to stay,’ she whispered. ‘You
two, you’re fucking addicted to each other. You are literally
going to be a nuclear family, you do know that? You will
explode. You will fucking detonate. You really think you can
possibly do this for, what, the next eighteen years? You
don’t think she’ll kill you?’
‘Not as long as I am the man she married. I wasn’t for a
while, but I can be.’
‘You don’t think you’ll kill 
her
? You want to turn into
Dad?’
‘Don’t you see, Go? This is my guarantee 
not
to turn
into Dad. I’ll have to be the best husband and father in the
world.’
Go burst into tears then – the first time I’d seen her cry
since she was a child. She sat down on the floor, straight
down, as if her legs gave out. I sat down beside her and
leaned my head against hers. She finally swallowed her last
sob and looked at me. ‘Remember when I said, Nick, I said

---

I’d still love you 
if
? I’d love you no matter what came after
the 
if
?’
‘Yes.’
‘Well, I still love you. But this breaks my heart.’ She let
out an awful sob, a child’s sob. ‘Things weren’t supposed to
turn out this way.’
‘It’s a strange twist,’ I said, trying to turn it light.
‘She won’t try to keep us apart, will she?’
‘No,’ I said. ‘Remember, she’s pretending to be
someone better too.’
Yes, I am finally a match for Amy. The other morning I woke
up next to her, and I studied the back of her skull. I tried to
read her thoughts. For once I didn’t feel like I was staring
into the sun. I’m rising to my wife’s level of madness.
Because I can feel her changing me again: I was a callow
boy, and then a man, good and bad. Now at last I’m the
hero. I am the one to root for in the never-ending war story
of our marriage. It’s a story I can live with. Hell, at this point,
I can’t imagine my story without Amy. She is my forever
antagonist.
We are one long frightening climax.

---