Nick Carraway, a Midwesterner bondsman, rents a cottage in West Egg next to the mysterious millionaire Jay Gatsby. Drawn into the world of his cousin Daisy and her brutish husband Tom, Nick becomes the confidant for Gatsby's singular, five-year obsession: to win back Daisy and recreate a perfect past, a dream that ultimately collides with reality and ends in violence.
Gatsby attempted to defend himself, but the accusation had struck its mark. He turned to Daisy and demanded that she renounce Tom completely, that she declare she had never loved him. Daisy hesitated. She tried to satisfy both men, admitting her love for Gatsby while unable to erase the history she shared with Tom. When pressed, she finally admitted that she had loved Tom once—and that admission shattered everything Gatsby had built his dream upon. He had constructed an elaborate fantasy in which Daisy had been waiting for him all along, faithful in spirit if not in body, and her confession demolished that illusion. Tom, sensing his victory, told Daisy to go home in Gatsby’s car. His tone carried a brutal magnanimity, as though he were dismissing a servant who had overstepped.
Daisy and Gatsby drove away in the yellow car, leaving Tom to follow with Nick and Jordan. As they passed through the valley of ashes in the deepening twilight, Myrtle Wilson broke free from the room where her husband had locked her and rushed into the road. She had seen the yellow car earlier and believed Tom was driving it; she ran out to stop him, perhaps to beg for help or to escape the life that was strangling her. Daisy, behind the wheel and already frayed by the events of the afternoon, swerved but could not avoid the collision. The impact killed Myrtle instantly. Daisy did not stop. She drove on into the darkness, leaving the body crumpled in the road.
Tom arrived at the scene moments later and pushed through the crowd that had gathered. He saw Myrtle’s body laid out on a workbench, and the sight broke something in him. When Wilson, nearly mad with grief, began crying out that he knew what kind of car had killed his wife, Tom took hold of him and lied with calculated tenderness. He assured Wilson that the yellow car was not his, that he had not seen it all afternoon. He positioned himself as a friend offering comfort, while secretly ensuring that suspicion would fall elsewhere. Then he hurried Nick and Jordan back to the car and drove away, weeping for the woman he had loved and the world that had just collapsed around him.
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