My parents are worried, of course, but how can I feel sorry for them, since they made me this way and then deserted me? They never, ever fully appreciated the fact that they were earning money from my existence, that I should have been getting royalties. Then, after they siphoned off my money, my “feminist” parents let Nick bundle me off to Missouri like I was some piece of chattel, some mail-order bride, some property exchange. Gave me a fucking cuckoo clock to remember them by. Thanks for thirty-six years of service! They deserve to think I’m dead, because that’s practically the state they consigned me to: no money, no home, no friends. They deserve to suffer too. If you can’t take care of me while I’m alive, you have made me dead anyway. Just like Nick, who destroyed and rejected the real me a piece at a time—you’re too serious, Amy, you’re too uptight, Amy, you overthink things, you analyze too much, you’re no fun anymore, you make me feel useless, Amy, you make me feel bad, Amy. He took away chunks of me with blasé swipes: my independence, my pride, my esteem. I gave, and he took and took. He Giving Treed me out of existence.
That whore, he picked that little whore over me. He killed my soul, which should be a crime. Actually, it is a crime. According to me, at least.
NICK DUNNE
SEVEN DAYS GONE
I had to phone Tanner, my brand-new lawyer, mere hours after I’d hired him, and say the words that would make him regret taking my money: I think my wife is framing me. I couldn’t see his face, but I could imagine it—the eye roll, the grimace, the weariness of a man who hears nothing but lies for a living.
“Well,” he finally said after a gaping pause, “I’ll be there first thing tomorrow morning, and we will sort this out—everything on the table—and in the meantime, sit tight, okay? Go to sleep and sit tight.”
Go took his advice; she popped two sleeping pills and left me just before eleven, while I literally sat tight, in an angry ball on her couch. Every so often I’d go outside and glare at the woodshed, my hands on my hips, as if it were a predator I could scare off. I’m not sure what I thought I was accomplishing, but I couldn’t stop myself. I could stay seated for five minutes, tops, before I’d have to go back outside and stare.
I had just come back inside when a knock rattled the back door. Fucking Christ. Not quite midnight. Cops would come to the front—right?—and reporters had yet to stake out Go’s (this would change, in a matter of days, hours). I was standing, unnerved, undecided, in the living room when the banging came again, louder, and I cursed under my breath, tried to get myself angry instead of scared. Deal with it, Dunne.
I flung open the door. It was Andie. It was goddamn Andie, pretty as a picture, dressed up for the occasion, still not getting it—that she was going to put my neck right in the noose.
“Right in the noose, Andie.” I yanked her inside, and she stared at my hand on her arm. “You are going to put my neck right in the fucking noose.”
“I came to the back door,” she said. When I stared her down, she didn’t apologize, she steeled herself. I could literally see her features harden. “I needed to see you, Nick. I told you. I told you I had to see you or talk to you every day, and today you disappeared. Straight to voice mail, straight to voice mail, straight to voice mail.”
“If you don’t hear from me, it’s because I can’t talk, Andie. Jesus, I was in New York, getting a lawyer. He’ll be here first thing tomorrow.”
“You got a lawyer. That was what kept you so busy that you couldn’t call me for ten seconds?”
I wanted to smack her. I took a breath. I had to cut things off with Andie. It wasn’t just Tanner’s warning I had in mind. My wife knew me: She knew I’d do almost anything to avoid dealing with confrontation. Amy was depending on me to be stupid, to let the relationship linger—and to ultimately be caught. I had to end it. But I had to do it perfectly. Make her believe that this was the decent thing.
“He’s actually given me some important advice,” I began. “Advice I can’t ignore.”
I’d been so sweet and doting just last night, at my mandatory meeting in our pretend fort. I’d made so many promises, trying to calm her down. She wouldn’t see this coming. She wouldn’t take this well.
“Advice? Good. Is it to stop being such an asshole to me?”
I felt the rage rise up; that this was already turning into a high school fight. A thirty-four-year-old man in the middle of the worst night of my life, and I was having a meet me by the lockers! squabble with a pissed-off girl. I shook her once, hard, a tiny droplet of spit landing on her lower lip.