How It All Goes Down
Amy Elliott Dunne—June 26, 2012
- We cut directly from Nick's vision of Amy's bloodied, pregnant body to her diary entry, where she claims that she's "never felt more alive." Amy woke up puking, did the math, and decided it was time to get a pregnancy test. Guess what the results were? She runs over to Noelle's to tell her the news.
- Amy thinks of two things as the knowledge of her pregnancy sinks in. First, her anniversary is next week. She decides to do what we've already seen playing out in the scavenger hunt: write love letters as the clues. What we also know now, though, is where the clues are leading: to his present, an antique wooden cradle (because anniversary five is wood… how sweet).
- Second, she begins wishing she'd been able to get a gun. Nick took her out on the raft on the river a few weeks ago and she had this awful feeling he was going to tip it over and kill her. It's clear that Nick is done with her and that now that her money is gone and her looks are beginning to go, she's outlived her purpose.
- But she refuses to divorce him, because she still has too many happy memories of him, of thinking how lucky she was that she would get to have his children. Abortion is also out of the question. She finds out that her six-week-old fetus is the size of a lentil, and even takes out a grain from a bean container and looks at it, then carries it in her pocket.
- She wonders if Nick is planning to kill her. She definitely thinks he's capable of it, and leaves a warning to readers that if she's dead, they know what happened.