Gone Girl: A Novel by Gillian Flynn Page A

sans-serif font set in hunter green, on the thick creamy stock that will hold lush ink and his writer’s words. Stationery for a writer, and a writer’s wife who’s maybe angling for a love letter or two.
    Then maybe we’ll have sex again. And a late-night burger. And more Scotch. Voilà: happiest couple on the block! And they say marriage is such hard work.

NICK DUNNE
THE NIGHT OF
    B oney and Gilpin moved our interview to the police station, which looks like a failing community bank. They left me alone in a little room for forty minutes, me willing myself not to move. To pretend to be calm is to be calm, in a way. I slouched over the table, put my chin on my arm. Waited.
    “Do you want to call Amy’s parents?” Boney had asked.
    “I don’t want to panic them,” I said. “If we don’t hear from her in an hour, I’ll call.”
    We’d done three rounds of that conversation.
    Finally, the cops came in and sat at the table across from me. I fought the urge to laugh at how much it felt like a TV show. This was the same room I’d seen surfing through late-night cable for the past ten years, and the two cops—weary, intense—acted like the stars. Totally fake. Epcot Police Station. Boney was even holding a paper coffee cup and a manila folder that looked like a prop. Cop prop. I felt giddy, felt for a moment we were all pretend people:
Let’s play the Missing Wife game!
    “You okay there, Nick?” Boney asked.
    “I’m okay, why?”
    “You’re smiling.”
    The giddiness slid to the tiled floor. “I’m sorry, it’s all just—”
    “I know,” Boney said, giving me a look that was like a hand pat. “It’s too strange, I know.” She cleared her throat. “First of all, we want to make sure you’re comfortable here. You need anything, justlet us know. The more information you can give us right now, the better, but you can leave at any time, that’s not a problem either.”
    “Whatever you need.”
    “Okay, great, thank you,” she said. “Um, okay. I want to get the annoying stuff out of the way first. The crap stuff. If your wife was indeed abducted—and we don’t know that, but if it comes to that—we want to catch the guy, and when we catch the guy, we want to nail him, hard. No way out. No wiggle room.”
    “Right.”
    “So we have to rule you out real quick, real easy. So the guy can’t come back and say we didn’t rule you out, you know what I mean?”
    I nodded mechanically. I didn’t really know what she meant, but I wanted to seem as cooperative as possible. “Whatever you need.”
    “We don’t want to freak you out,” Gilpin added. “We just want to cover all the bases.”
    “Fine by me.”
It’s always the husband
, I thought.
Everyone knows it’s always the husband, so why can’t they just say it: We suspect you because you are the husband, and it’s always the husband. Just watch
Dateline.
    “Okay, great, Nick,” Boney said. “First let’s get a swab of the inside of your cheek so we can rule out all of the DNA in the house that isn’t yours. Would that be okay?”
    “Sure.”
    “I’d also like to take a quick sweep of your hands for gun shot residue. Again, just in case—”
    “Wait, wait, wait. Have you found something that makes you think my wife was—”
    “Nonono, Nick,” Gilpin interrupted. He pulled a chair up to the table and sat on it backward. I wondered if cops actually did that. Or did some clever actor do that, and then cops began doing it because they’d seen the actors playing cops do that and it looked cool?
    “It’s just smart protocol,” Gilpin continued. “We try to cover every base: Check your hands, get a swab, and if we could check out your car too …”
    “Of course. Like I said, whatever you need.”
    “Thank you, Nick. I really appreciate it. Sometimes guys, they make things hard for us just because they can.”
    I was exactly the opposite. My father had infused my childhood with unspoken blame; he was the kind of man who