Gone-Girl-by-Gillian-Flynn

two parents cling to each other as they wait for their only child to be officially
returned to them). It would discuss the incompetence of the cops (it was a
biased case, full of dead ends and wrong turns, with the police department
focused doggedly on the wrong man). The article would dismiss Jacqueline
Collings in a single line: After an awkward run-in with the Elliott parents, an
embittered Jacqueline Collings was ushered out of the room, claiming her son
was innocent.
Jacqueline was indeed ushered out of the room into another, where her
statement would be recorded and she would be kept out of the way of the
much better story: the Triumphant Return of Amazing Amy.
When Amy was released to us, it all began again. The photos and the
tears, the hugging and the laughter, all for strangers who wanted to see and to
know: What was it like? Amy, what does it feel like to escape your captor and
return to your husband? Nick, what does it feel like to get your wife back, to
get your freedom back, all at once?
I remained mostly silent. I was thinking my own questions, the same
questions I’d thought for years, the ominous refrain of our marriage: What are
you thinking, Amy? How are you feeling? Who are you? What have we done
to each other? What will we do?
It was a gracious, queenly act for Amy to want to come home to our marriage
bed with her cheating husband. Everyone agreed. The media followed us as if
we were a royal wedding procession, the two of us whizzing through the
neon, fast-food-cluttered streets of Carthage to our McMansion on the river.
What grace Amy has, what moxie. A storybook princess. And I, of course,
was the lickspittle hunchback of a husband who would bow and scrape the
rest of my days. Until she was arrested. If she ever got arrested.
That she was released at all was a concern. More than a concern, an utter
shock. I saw them all filing out of the conference room where they questioned
her for four hours and then let her go: two FBI guys with alarmingly short
hair and blank faces; Gilpin, looking like he’d swallowed the greatest steak
dinner of his life; and Boney, the only one with thin, tight lips and a little V of
a frown. She glanced at me as she walked past, arched an eyebrow, and was
gone.
Then, too quickly, Amy and I were back in our home, alone in the living
room, Bleecker watching us with shiny eyes. Outside our curtains, the lights
of the TV cameras remained, bathing our living room in a bizarrely lush
orange glow. We looked candlelit, romantic. Amy was absolutely beautiful. I