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.
AMY ELLIOTT DUNNE
TEN WEEKS AFTER THE RETURN
Nick 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.