Page 14 of Matchmaking for Psychopaths

Despite the drama of Aidan’s arrival, I was grateful to have new clients, as they were the only thing that stopped the situation with Molly and Noah from becoming all-consuming.

Because neither of them had reached out since their big reveal, I was left scrolling their social media pages, searching for clues as to what they might be up to.

It was a torturous practice. Rather than settling on the couch to relax after work, I put on my pajamas and stared at the faces of the people who’d broken my heart.

It had to be done. Nicole followed Molly, so if Molly posted about her new relationship, then I would be exposed.

Thus far, Molly had stuck to her usual memes, and Noah hadn’t posted anything at all.

Between his silence online and his lack of communication with me, he may as well have been dead.

Finding nothing interesting, I inputted Aidan Lewis into the search bar of the social media app.

It was a common name, and I started systematically weeding through the results.

There were short Aidans, tall Aidans, Black Aidans, white Aidans, but none of them was the man I was looking for.

Could he be one of the rare people in contemporary society who didn’t exist online?

A search on my web browser didn’t yield any further results.

I logged on to the Better Love platform in pursuit of more information.

Here is what I learned:

He was thirty-seven years old and a private jet pilot. He’d been to every continent. His longest-ever relationship was two months. He had three siblings—two sisters and a brother—and wasn’t currently close with his family. When asked to describe himself, he used the term “neat freak.”

Looking at his profile, I understood why people became frustrated with dating apps.

The facts were listed. I knew his birth date, where he was born, his favorite food and color, but none of that captured what it was like to be in a room with him.

He was persuasive in a way that was dangerous.

The kind of man women knew to stay away from but went home with anyway.

An unexpected truth I’d learned from matchmaking was that there was such a thing as being too handsome and charming.

Once that boundary was crossed, a person became untrustworthy.

Thankfully, Aidan and I were at no risk of becoming involved, despite his insistence that the two of us were compatible.

Even if Noah hadn’t been in the picture, I wasn’t about to jeopardize my position at Better Love.

I’d already built up the franchise in my head.

First, Serena would open branches in every major city in the United States.

Next, we would go global, become a leader in love across the world.

The idea of moving to Europe appealed to me—to London or Paris—the safety of an ocean separating me from my mother.

It was going to be difficult to match Aidan.

I’d seen that he persuaded Serena to let him into the building against protocol.

He needed a woman who wouldn’t cower before him, someone who would question his motives at every turn.

Rebecca was the only current client I could think of who might satisfy that requirement, but as with Aidan, I didn’t yet know her well enough to judge.

I’d enjoyed my conversation with Rebecca.

I really had. It had been easy and natural in a way that most interactions with new clients were not.

If I was grateful that Better Love’s rules prevented me from pursuing anything romantic with Aidan, I was irritated that they kept me from forming a friendship with Rebecca.

Ordinarily, I enjoyed sitting alone on the couch, wrapped in a blanket, but the loneliness of it was beginning to eat at me.

I did another social media search, this time for Rebecca’s name.

I was pleased that she popped up immediately.

Like a lot of beautiful women, she had thousands of followers.

People were willing to watch her do anything.

Most of her posts were car-centric. She posed next to vehicles or took immaculate selfies behind the wheel.

Based on the number of comments she got from men who called her “gorgeous,” it was a successful sales tactic.

Men weren’t buying the car, but rather the woman who sold it to them, or so they thought.

It never occurred to them that they were being manipulated.

They couldn’t see all the ways in which they were weak.

In addition to all the male commenters was a woman, Maureen, who commented on every single post in a platonic, motherly way.

Were they friends? She was a glimmer of what Rebecca’s life might be like beyond her external sheen.

I clicked on Maureen’s profile and found a series of poorly lit pictures of two sticky children.

Sprinkled among them were older shots of a woman Maureen identified as “Mom.” After a few minutes of scrolling, I determined that “Mom” was dead, and a few minutes after that, I came to the startling realization that “Mom” had been murdered, which explained the somber tone of everything Maureen said.

How did Maureen and Rebecca know each other?

Aesthetically, they didn’t belong in the same space.

Attractive people flocked to attractive people.

Could they be related? No, Rebecca said that her family lived in a different state, and when I checked Maureen’s page it said that she also lived in the Twin Cities.

It was a group photo that allowed me to figure out the connection between Rebecca and Maureen. The group was an odd mixture of the young and old, attractive and ordinary, mostly women, and a couple of men, with their arms around one another.

I’m so grateful for the Children of Murdered Parents support group. They have literally saved my life, Maureen had written beneath the picture.

My brain latched on to the words, a hook through the eye of a fish.

Had one of Rebecca’s parents been murdered?

She hadn’t mentioned that in her intake paperwork.

In my time as a matchmaker I’d heard about all sorts of ways that parents had fucked up their children so that it was difficult for them to have successful relationships: a dozen divorces, parents who stayed together but should’ve gotten divorced, second families, and affairs.

I’d had clients with parents who had passed away due to age, heart disease, and cancer. Murder, however—that was something new.

I did a search for Children of Murdered Parents support group and discovered that they met on Thursday nights at a nearby library.

Ordinarily on Thursdays, Molly came over with takeout and we watched Love on the Lake .

It was a years-long pre-weekend ritual, with only occasional interruptions for travel or holidays.

I was dreading having to spend the night alone.

Though watching television was usually thought of as a solo activity, it was one of the ways that I formed connections with other people.

Molly and I posted on social media about episodes as they aired.

We shared memes with each other. We talked about the cast members like they were people we knew, and we basically did know them after watching them on-screen for so many years.

Being a Love on the Lake fan meant a built-in friend group.

Rebecca was proof of that. The two of us had bonded instantly over our shared viewing.

Reading about Children of Murdered Parents, I realized that there was more to my connection with Rebecca than I’d initially thought. We’d clicked instantly, and it wasn’t solely because both of us watched Love on the Lake . We were drawn to each other because I had a murdered parent too.