Nick goes to the police station to give a statement to the police about his marriage and the events leading up to his wife’s disappearance. He gives a DNA sample, and his hands are swabbed for gun powder residue. As the detectives question him about Amy, he realizes that he knows nearly nothing about her current life. He doesn’t know if she has any friends, for example, or what she does with her time when he is at work. Amy doesn’t have a job.

Nick left home at 7:30 a.m. that morning and arrived at work just after noon. He tells the police that he took coffee and a newspaper to the beach, but he tells the reader that this is a lie.

Nick also reveals to the reader that Amy confronted him at breakfast on the morning of their anniversary, telling him to decide if he wants to be married to her anymore. He reports that Amy has completely changed since he married her; she has become a “razor-wire knot daring me to unloop her, and I was not up to the job with my thick, numb, nervous fingers” (49). She is angry and bitter. Nick has moved her away from her family and her wonderful life in New York to the backwater of Carthage, Missouri; then he compounded that trauma by neglecting her.