Gone Girl: 21. Nick Dunne, Five Days Gone (1) Summary & Analysis

Go angrily lambasts Nick for sleeping with one of his students, lamenting that he is not “one of the good guys” like she always thought he was. She points out that even their deadbeat father, Bill, didn’t go so far as to cheat on their mother, Maureen—and adds that Nick is “fucked” in terms of the investigation, as news of Andie will surely come out soon. Nick accuses Go of turning against him, pointing out that she never even liked Amy, but Go tells him he’s “insane.” Go, exhausted, sits down and tell Nick that they need to hire a lawyer before the media turns him into “the evil philandering husband.” Go gets up and goes to her room, planning to make some calls.

Nick falls back asleep and dreams of Amy, her head misshapen and bloody. He knows that he needs to go home and face “the scene of the crime.” He drives back to his and Amy’s neighborhood and steps back into his house for the first time in days. The police have been everywhere, and the house smells strange. Nick greets his and Amy’s cat, Bleecker, who’s been fed by the police, and then heads upstairs, where he looks around getting lost in thought as he looks back on “the day of.” His phone rings—it is Go, telling him that the notorious and “permanently furious” cable news host Ellen Abbott is doing a segment on Amy right now.

Nick turns on the TV and watches the segment, in which Ellen reveals that Nick’s full name is “Lance Nicholas Dunne.” She interviews Shawna Kelly, and shows the “cheerful” selfie Shawna snapped during the search for Amy. Ellen Abbott devotes the segment to “obsessing over [Nick’s] lack of alibi” and indicting Nick’s character. As he watches the program, he calls Ellen and Shawna horrible names inside his head.

Nick, needing to do something “useful,” gets in his car and drives to St. Louis to track down Desi Collings. As he approaches Desi’s neighborhood, he realizes that the man is “extremely, sickly wealthy” and lives in a mansion that must cost at least five million dollars. Desi greets Nick cordially at the door, seeming to know both who he is and why he’s here without having been told. He and Nick sit down in the living room, and begin discussing Amy. Desi admits that when he saw the story on the news for the first time, he thought only “Of course”—he knows that Amy has long had a way of “making people want her.”

As Desi describes his relationship with Amy—in which he basked in her attention in its early stages, and became desperate once she saw his “flaws” and lost interest—Nick feels a “rush of disgust for sharing this emotion with [an]other man.” Desi brings Nick a framed photograph of himself and Amy from high school—Nick points out how odd it is that Desi has the photograph, but Desi insists the shot was too “perfect” to toss. Desi asks if there are any leads in the case, and Nick admits that he came to question Desi because Desi stalked Amy in high school. When Nick reminds Desi that he tried to kill himself in Amy’s dorm room, Desi says he has no idea what Nick is talking about. A woman comes in from another room—it is Desi’s mother Jacqueline, who is a “blurry vision of Amy.”

As the conversation goes on, Desi admits to having written Amy letters over the years. Jacqueline praises them for sustaining the lost art of letter-writing. Nick asks why Desi would write letters to a woman who never wrote him back, and insists that Amy always threw all of Desi’s letters into the trash—Nick would see them there sometimes. Desi’s eyes light up at this information. Jacqueline politely but definitively dismisses Nick, guiding him towards the door and pressing a business card into his hands. She instructs him to call their lawyer the next time he wants to get in touch with Desi.