The complex non-linear narrative of Gone Girl jumps back and forth across its story timeline, gradually revealing past events that affect the action in the present. Gone Girl opens with Nick Dunne (Ben Affleck) returning home on his fifth wedding anniversary to find that his wife, Amy (Rosamund Pike), is missing. This opening sequence instantly launches the local police — and the audience — into Gone Girl‘s central mystery. But it’s far from the first scene to take place chronologically. During the ensuing investigation into Amy’s disappearance, Gone Girl keeps cutting back to events in the past that eventually led to her self-abduction.

Perfectly cast as Amy Dunne, Rosamund Pike earned an Oscar nomination for Best Actress for her fierce, sinister turn as a resentful spouse who fakes her own kidnapping just to spite her husband. Gillian Flynn’s screenplay, adapted from her own novel, stays true to the source material with a lot of the same shocking twists and turns. The movie also adapted the book’s convoluted story timeline, carefully revealing crucial information to allow the audience to put together the pieces of the puzzle. Here’s what the movie would look like if it played out in chronological order.

January 8, 2005: Nick Dunne & Amy Elliott Meet

On January 8, 2005, at a party in New York City, Nick Dunne meets Amy Elliott, and his life is never the same again. Nick and Amy hit it off immediately as they have a lot in common, both writers working in the city. Two days later, on the 10th, Amy writes about the meeting in her diary. Nick is entranced by the fact that Amy was the inspiration for her parents’ popular Amazing Amy series of children’s books. After they start dating, they quickly fall in love.

February 24, 2007: Nick & Amy Get Engaged

A little over two years later, on February 24, 2007, Nick and Amy got engaged to be married. Amy decides it’s time to settle down, and she’s happy enough with Nick to take the plunge with him. During their courtship, Amy reveals to Nick that the Amazing Amy character was an idealized version of her without any of her imperfections. At the time, before they become husband and wife, Nick has no idea just how bad those imperfections are and how close they will come to ruining his life in the years that follow.

Summer 2010: Nick & Amy Move To Missouri

When the recession affects Nick’s income and his mother is diagnosed with breast cancer, he and Amy make the not-so-mutual decision to move to Missouri. The move means that they can save money on living costs and also be closer to Nick’s family during a tough time. Amy writes about the financial crisis’s effect on Nick’s career in a July diary entry, and about her feelings surrounding the move to Missouri in a September diary entry. Having to leave behind the glitzy metropolis of New York City to move to Nick’s hometown of North Carthage makes Amy resent him.

January 2011: Nick Begins An Affair With His Student

In January 2011, Nick starts cheating on Amy with one of his students, Andie Fitzgerald (Emily Ratajkowski). Engaging in an extramarital affair with another woman makes Nick even more distant in his relationship with Amy. The novel goes into more detail about Amy’s awareness of the affair. In the book, not only does Amy know Nick is cheating on her with Andie, but she also follows Andie around and stalks her social media profiles. She gets to know Andie so well from lurking in the shadows that she can tell her personality during the press conference is phony.

October 1, 2011: Amy Starts To Fear Nick

On October 1, 2011, Amy writes in her diary that she’s beginning to fear Nick. When she tells him that she thinks it’s time for them to have a baby and start a family, he argues with her. As she tries to keep him from leaving the house, he shoves her. Amy’s diary entries are the source of some of Gone Girl’s most quotable lines, and after Nick pushes her, she writes that she’s worried about his capacity for violence. The diary entries about this fear come back to haunt Nick later when Amy goes missing and the police start looking into her conspicuous husband’s past.

Early 2012: Amy Prepares For Her Disappearance

In the months leading up to Amy’s disappearance, she talks a distracted Nick into increasing her life insurance to $1.2 million. Amy also racks up thousands of dollars worth of credit card debt in Nick’s name, so that when she vanishes, it will look like he killed her for the insurance money.

July 5, 2012: Amy Disappears

On July 5, 2012, Nick and Amy’s fifth wedding anniversary, she goes missing. Nick comes home, and she is nowhere to be found. Since he can’t get in touch with her, he eventually reports her disappearance to the police, who quickly find alarming diary entries that seem to incriminate Nick — all of these are fabricated by Amy, proving to be among David Fincher’s best villains, in order to frame her husband.

July 6-11, 2012: Nick Begins An Attempt To Clear His Name

The day after Amy’s disappearance, Nick holds a press conference to portray himself as a concerned spouse. The next day, a pH๏τo of Nick with Shawna Kelly (Kathleen Rose Perkins), a flirtatious local woman, gains widespread media attention and prompts more scrutiny. The day after that, Nick holds another press conference and a vigil in Amy’s honor, but he also sleeps with his mistress, Andie.

Over the next few days, Nick hires attorney Tanner Bolt (Tyler Perry), who convinces him to go on live TV to appear innocent. Meanwhile, Amy is staying at a campground in the Ozarks and waiting for Nick, a protagonist the audience roots against, to be convicted of her murder.

July 24-30, 2012: Amy Stays With Desi Collings & Ultimately Kills Him

In late July, after being robbed by her campground neighbors, Amy visits her ex-boyfriend Desi Collings (Neil Patrick Harris), convincing him that she’s running from Nick’s abuse. Amy and Desi watch when Nick goes on live TV and confesses to having an affair while reiterating that he didn’t murder Amy. When Nick’s rampant credit card debt is uncovered and the purchases are found in his shed — all a part of Amy’s scheme — Detective Rhonda Boney (Kim Dickens) gets an arrest warrant and searches his property. After her plan fails and Nick is released from jail, Amy kills Desi and frames him for the kidnapping.

August 4, 2012: Amy Comes Home

After murdering Desi, Amy returns home covered in his blood (a possible Gone Girl plot hole) and claims that she killed him in self-defense. As she faints into Nick’s arms in front of a sea of news cameras, he is immediately cleared of all suspicion. She tells FBI investigators that Desi kidnapped and ᴀssaulted her, which she can “prove” with self-inflicted injuries. The story holds up because, years earlier, when their relationship ended, Amy had taken out a restraining order against Desi for stalking her. When Detective Boney tries to point out the inconsistencies in Amy’s account, Amy expertly turns it around on her.

September 23, 2012: Nick & Amy Decide To Stay Together For Their Baby

From the moment Amy returns home, Nick knows she is lying. He knows she faked the kidnapping to destroy his life and murdered Desi as a backup when the plan failed. In the weeks that follow, Nick secretly plots to do a live TV interview in which he’ll expose Amy’s lies. This leads to Gone Girl’s twist ending. On the morning of the interview, Amy reveals to Nick that she has inseminated herself with his sperm. Feeling trapped by responsibility, Nick decides to stay with Amy for the sake of the child. Against his better judgment, instead of revealing Amy’s crimes in the interview, Nick announces the pregnancy.

Timeline Differences In The Gone Girl Book

Despite Gone Girl following Gillian Flynn’s source material quite faithfully, no movie adaptation of a novel translates every aspect of it to the screen, including Gone Girl. One of the biggest differences earlier in the film is the scene where Nick proposes to Amy, as that isn’t in the book at all, with the source material never detailing how he proposed. Alongside that, the movie skips over Amy taking care of Nick’s dying mom, which makes sense, given the amount of material it had to get through.

Other moments throughout Gone Girl are a bit different from the book, but another major one is how Desi dies in both stories, with the movie’s take on his death being even more brutal. In the novel, Amy drugs Desi before cutting his throat, but the film has her kill him in mid-Sєx, and the iconic graphic imagery in that scene is one of the most haunting in the movie. Given that Gillian Flynn wrote the screenplay and David Finch is an incredible director, the changes made in Gone Girl were for the best in adapting the source material.