Page 17 of Matchmaking for Psychopaths

“I have to admit,” Rebecca said, over a heaping plate of pad thai, “I was shocked when I walked in and saw you there. I thought…well, I don’t know what I thought.”

I laughed.

“It was a weird coincidence,” I agreed. “You showed up at Better Love, and then a couple days later, there I am in your support group. It’s like when you hear a word for the first time and then suddenly it’s everywhere.

There’s a name for it. The Baader-Meinhof phenomenon? We’re Baader-Meinhoffing each other.”

There were, of course, no real coincidences.

In romantic comedies, protagonists were always bumping into their soulmates and enemies.

The whole premise of the movie Serendipity was that the love interests would find their way back together if they were meant to be.

In real life, I had stalked Rebecca on social media until I figured out where she’d be, and my entrance had been met with appropriate suspicion.

It was so much easier to make friends and fall in love in a fictional world.

“I couldn’t believe it when you said that your father was killed,” she said. “I’ve never actually met someone else whose father was murdered—you know, outside of COMP. I’m sorry if I forced you into talking about it. I think I was feeling territorial.”

“No, it was good, actually,” I assured her. “Like I said, it’s hard to talk about. I needed the push.”

Everyone in the group was very supportive after I told them how my father died.

I was in a safe space, they said. They understood what I was going through, and they hoped I would come back.

Afterward, Rebecca invited me out to dinner at a nearby Thai restaurant while Maureen watched enviously.

I knew how that felt, longing for friendship.

I was grateful that Rebecca had chosen me.

I saw the invitation as an olive branch after the way she’d looked at me when she saw me sitting in the meeting.

She was accepting me as one of them, the child of a murdered parent—a member of a club that no one wanted to be in.

I still wasn’t certain how or when her father had died. Everyone in the group already knew, which made me jealous. I wanted to suck the information out with my teeth.

“I don’t like to talk about my father either,” she told me at dinner. “I joined COMP after a couple of outbursts at work. My boss said it wasn’t mandatory, but it was basically mandatory. I ended up liking it. It’s nice to not feel alone for a few minutes every week.”

She paused and took a bite of her food. I’d noted that she ordered it “Thai spicy,” a level of heat that came with a warning in the menu.

“Should I be telling you this? Are you going to hold it against me as my matchmaker?” she asked after she swallowed. There was no sign that she was affected by the heat. I was the same way—I took the warning as a dare. It made me respect her all the more.

I shook my head.

“No. We’re not talking as matchmaker and client. We’re talking as friends,” I told her.

At the word “friend” a small smile flashed across Rebecca’s face. She could sense the connection between us too. There was something about us written in the stars.

“Okay, I’ll tell you what happened as friends, then,” she said. “I had this coworker, another salesperson. He was the kind of slimy guy that people think of when they think of someone who sells cars.”

“So the opposite of you?”

“Exactly. The opposite of me. Anyway, he kept asking me out on dates and I kept saying no. There is no universe in which I would’ve gone out with him. I tried to stay polite, because you know how men are when you reject them.”

I did.

“Then we were at the company holiday party and he got drunk. Really, really drunk. He followed me into the bathroom and tried to kiss me. Thankfully, I’ve been taking boxing lessons for years. He didn’t know what hit him.”

“What the fuck? That’s so messed up.”

“I know. The worst part was that he’s married, and his wife was at the party.”

“Oh my god.”

“Yeah. I reported him to HR, and they told me that they couldn’t fire him because it was a case of ‘he said, she said,’ and that he claimed that I came on to him . Let’s just say that my reaction was…well, not cute.”

“Obviously! How did they think you would react? You should’ve punched the HR person too.”

“Somehow nothing happened to him, and I was required to go to therapy. I tried a more traditional therapist at first, but he came on to me and I was like Fuck that . COMP has been a lifesaver. I didn’t know that I needed to talk about my dad until I did.”

“What happened to the guy you worked with?”

“Oh, he died.”

“What?”

“Yeah, it was crazy. I guess he got drunk, went into work, and ended up taking one of the cars for a test drive. He drove off a bridge and drowned.”

“Wow. That’s wild.”

The restaurant was crowded. It was the kind of late-January evening that begged for comfort food.

Around us, people spooned steaming curry into their mouths.

I barely noticed them. I was a horse wearing blinders, and all I could see was Rebecca sitting in front of me.

Our lives weren’t identical, not exactly, but she was more akin to me than anyone else I’d ever met.

She was the kind of friend I’d been looking for my whole life, what I’d thought I’d found in Molly.

“Tell me more about this Paul guy,” she said, changing the topic. “Will he be the love of my life?”

“He might be. You’ll like him. He’s attractive, a good conversationalist.”

I was mildly uncomfortable talking about work in that setting. However, the line of impropriety was so far behind me that I could no longer see it when I turned back to look. I struggled to consider the director position when Rebecca’s face glowed across the table.

“If he’s so great, why hasn’t he found someone?” she asked.

“I think it’s a struggle of abundance. Too many women have fallen in love with him, and now he doesn’t know how to commit. You could be the person to change that.”

“Is that a challenge?” she teased.

“If you want it to be.”

“Did you meet your fiancé through Better Love?” she asked.

The question startled me. How did she know about Noah? Had I mentioned him? Had she spied on my social media the same way that I’d spied on hers? Then I remembered the ring on my finger, the framed picture on my desk at work. There were so many ways in which I gave myself away for free.

I almost told the truth, admitted to her what Noah and Molly had done.

I had, after all, told her about my father’s passing, which I almost never mentioned.

After that, talking about my breakup was like telling her about my favorite color or how I liked my eggs cooked in the morning.

But my father’s death wasn’t the recent, raw thing that the breakup was.

More important, it didn’t make me look pathetic.

I couldn’t admit to Rebecca that my fiancé had left me for my best friend, because I wanted her to think that I was worthy of love.

If I told her the truth, she might wonder what was wrong with me.

I would be reduced to the status of Maureen from the support group, someone desperately longing for attention from a woman who gave it only incrementally.

So I created a world in which Noah and I were still together.

In other words, I lied.

“No. We met in a bar,” I told her.

“Ah. The old-fashioned way of meeting. I didn’t know that people did that anymore.”

“It was very cute. Also, painful. I fell down in front of him, and he helped me up. It turned out that my ankle was broken, and he had to take me to the hospital.”

“Oh my god. It sucks that your ankle broke, but that’s so precious. What does he do?”

“He’s a doctor. Or he will be. He’s in the last year of his residency.”

“Wow, what a meet-cute. I can’t believe you fell into the arms of a doctor. I only seem to meet finance bros and lawyers,” Rebecca lamented.

Both of us had finished all the food on our plates. We were voracious eaters. It was nice to share a meal with someone who wasn’t constantly talking about dieting, the way that Molly did.

“I’m familiar with that type from the corporate jobs I had before I started at Better Love. They were awful,” I said.

“How did you end up working as a matchmaker anyway? It’s not exactly a conventional career. Did you major in love in college?”

I laughed.

“No, I majored in psychology. I thought I was going to be a therapist. I guess I’ve always been interested in people and what makes them the way that they are, why they do what they do.

Matchmaking is an extension of that. My mom and I used to watch romantic comedies together, and I still love dating shows.

I think who we choose to love or not love reveals a lot about us as people.

So many of my clients tell me that everyone they’ve dated in the past showed up waving giant red flags.

They think that it’s coincidental or, like, it’s separate from who they are, but it’s not.

It’s my job to figure out how they can develop a healthy relationship despite their impulses. ”

Rebecca clasped the charm on her necklace, dragging it back and forth across the chain while I spoke, her eyes on my face.

“You make matchmaking sound so noble,” she said when I’d finished. “Meanwhile, I just sell cars to horny married dudes.”

“Hey, we all have a role to play,” I told her.

We split the bill, because that was what friends did. It also gave me plausible deniability with Serena. Yes, I’d met up with a client outside the office. Yes, we’d had dinner together. But it was an equal exchange of goods and services. We were becoming friends. What could be harmful about that?

“I had a wonderful time getting to know you tonight, Lexie,” Rebecca said in the parking lot.

The two of us lingered. Had she been a romantic interest, I would’ve wanted her to kiss me. As it was, I wished that she would come home with me so that we could sit on the couch and watch television.

“We should exchange numbers,” I blurted out before we parted.

Technically, I already had access to her number, but it didn’t look good to text clients from my personal phone.

“Oh, yeah, of course.”

Rebecca handed me her phone so that I could input my contact information.

There was nothing that could rectify what Molly had done to me. I couldn’t think about her face without wanting to smash something. Meeting Rebecca felt predestined. We’d known each other for only a few days, and already I could tell that she would be the friend to me that Molly never was.

I was so excited by the possibilities of our burgeoning friendship—nights spent drinking wine, girls’ trips to the beach like cast members always took on reality television—that I completely forgot about the results of the Better Love intake questionnaire.

The one that had labeled Rebecca a psychopath.