Argh! I don't know what to do! - Word count 51,723 (wp) 66,750 (pr)

I posted last night about this fiendish scene that would let the reader imagine a terrible thing had happened. When I was coming to the end of the next scene this evening a great idea occured to me, an idea that would bring my protagonist and antagonist into a direct confrontation with each other that would foreshadow the novel's climax.

Brilliant, I thought, a spike of action and drama to see us over until we get to the big showdown. Except... it would make the last scene, the fiendish one, redundant.

Now I don't know what to do. It's not that it would make the previous scene illogical or inconsistent with the rest of the plot - it would just make it pointless. The awful thing the antagonist (maybe) did would now be meaningless as the protagonist would never know it had happened.

Quandry!