“I know,” I say. I know exactly what I am supposed to say to Desi. “You’re right. You’re absolutely right. I haven’t felt so safe in so long, Desi, but I am still … I see him and … I’m fighting this, but he hurt me … for years.”
“Maybe we shouldn’t watch any more,” he says, twirling my hair, leaning too close.
“No, leave it on,” I say. “I have to face this. With you. I can do it with you.” I put my hand in his. Now shut the fuck up.
I just want Amy to come home so I can spend the rest of my life making it up to her, treating her how she deserves.
Nick forgives me—I screwed you over, you screwed me over, let’s make up. What if his code is true? Nick wants me back. Nick wants me back so he can treat me right. So he can spend the rest of his life treating me the way he should. It sounds rather lovely. We could go back to New York. Sales for the Amazing Amy books have skyrocketed since my disappearance—three generations of readers have remembered how much they love me. My greedy, stupid, irresponsible parents can finally pay back my trust fund. With interest.
Because I want to go back to my old life. Or my old life with my old money and my New Nick. Love-Honor-and-Obey Nick. Maybe he’s learned his lesson. Maybe he’ll be like he was before. Because I’ve been daydreaming—trapped in my Ozarks cabin, trapped in Desi’s mansion compound, I have a lot of time to daydream and what I’ve been daydreaming of is Nick in those early days. I thought I would daydream more about Nick getting ass-raped in prison, but I haven’t so much, not so much, lately. I think about those early, early days, when we would lie in bed next to each other, naked flesh on cool cotton, and he would just stare at me, one finger tracing my jaw from my chin to my ear, making me wriggle, that light tickling on my lobe, and then through all the seashell curves of my ear and into my hairline, and then he’d take hold of one lock of hair, like he did that very first time we kissed, and pull it all the way to the end and tug twice, gently, like he was ringing a bell. And he’d say, “You are better than any storybook, you are better than anything anyone could make up.”
Nick fastened me to the earth. Nick wasn’t like Desi, who brought me things I wanted (tulips, wine) to make me do the things he wanted (love him). Nick just wanted me to be happy, that’s all, very pure. Maybe I mistook that for laziness. I just want you to be happy, Amy. How many times did he say that and I took it to mean: I just want you to be happy, Amy, because that’s less work for me. But maybe I was unfair. Well, not unfair but confused. No one I’ve loved has ever not had an agenda. So how could I know?
It really is true. It took this awful situation for us to realize it. Nick and I fit together. I am a little too much, and he is a little too little. I am a thornbush, bristling from the overattention of my parents, and he is a man of a million little fatherly stab wounds, and my thorns fit perfectly into them.
I need to get home to him.
NICK DUNNE
FOURTEEN DAYS GONE
I woke up on my sister’s couch with a raging hangover and an urge to kill my wife. This was fairly common in the days after the Diary Interview with the police. I’d imagine finding Amy tucked away in some spa on the West Coast, sipping pineapple juice on a divan, her cares floating way, far away, above a perfect blue sky, and me, dirty, smelly from an urgent cross-country drive, standing in front of her, blocking the sun until she looks up, and then my hands around her perfect throat, with its cords and hollows and the pulse thumping first urgently and then slowly as we look into each other’s eyes and at last have some understanding.
I was going to be arrested. If not today, tomorrow; if not tomorrow, the next day. I had taken the fact that the police let me walk out of the station as a good sign, but Tanner had shut me down: “Without a body, a conviction is incredibly tough. They’re just dotting the I’s, crossing the T’s. Spend these days doing whatever you need to do, because once the arrest happens, we’ll be busy.”
Just outside the window, I could hear the rumbling of camera crews—men greeting one another good morning, as if they were clocking in at the factory. Cameras click-click-clicked like restless locusts, shooting the front of Go’s house. Someone had leaked the discovery of my “man cave” of goods on my sister’s property, my imminent arrest. Neither of us had dared to so much as flick at a curtain.
Go walked into the room in flannel boxers and her high school Butthole Surfers T-shirt, her laptop in the crook of an arm. “Everyone hates you again,” she said.