Page 19 of Matchmaking for Psychopaths

“About your parents?”

I jerked backward, in an attempt to put distance between us, and bumped into an irritated-looking bald man.

Usually I was capable of playing it cool in the most stressful of situations, but Aidan had brought up a topic that activated me.

It confirmed what I already knew—I’d told Aidan about my parents.

But what else? Secrets were boxes that held smaller boxes within.

Just when it seemed the most deeply embedded package was reached, there was something new to unveil.

“He knows what he needs to,” I replied.

What went unsaid: that I hadn’t told him because men like Noah didn’t marry women with families like mine. He came from the kind of people who pretended to be accepting, until they were presented with someone who defied their understanding of the world.

“I’ve heard that good relationships are built on trust,” Aidan said pointedly. He knew that I hadn’t told Noah. I never tell anyone this, I’d said to him that night in the hotel room.

“We do trust each other,” I said.

Finally, the line began to move, and Aidan and I each took a step forward.

“What about you? Are you going to tell me how you figured out that you’re a psychopath?” I asked him.

Until that moment, I’d never seen Aidan look uncomfortable.

The paradox of the psychopath was how they fit in everywhere, and nowhere at all.

He was so smooth that he could talk his way into any room, no matter how tightly the door was locked.

I’d figured out his trigger the same way that he’d figured out mine.

“I told you,” he said, “the night we met. Don’t you remember?”

No. I searched through the parts of the night that had turned black, and found nothing. The steak, the table, the hot tub, the car, the bed…What had he said, and when had he said it? I hadn’t thought any of it important. He was supposed to be a blip.

“Sir,” the cashier called out to him.

Aidan turned away. There was a kind of energy buzzing off of him that I hadn’t felt before.

“Have a nice night, Lexie,” he said after he paid.

I ignored the urge to reach out and grab him. Tell me what you did. Aidan was a distraction from the pathway. I couldn’t let myself get interrupted again.

After the florist, I went to the grocery store to purchase dinner ingredients.

I walked through the aisles with a new wariness, worried that I might somehow bump into Aidan again.

As I gathered my items, I told myself that it wasn’t the universe or serendipity pushing Aidan and me together.

It was coincidence, just as it had been a coincidence when I’d shown up at the COMP meeting Rebecca attended each week.

I ignored the fact that my presence at the meeting had been a planned thing.

Grocery shopping was a comforting routine.

Noah had never explicitly voiced that he expected a female partner to make dinner, but he acted in such a way that implied it. Everything clicked together when I met his parents and realized that he understood their relationship to be emblematic of “normal.”

“I love my children more than anything,” his mother had confided in me once, “but sometimes I worry that I spoiled them.”

There was evidence of said spoiling in the way that Noah inhabited spaces. He left dirty dishes sitting on the table, a sink full of hair after shaving, and he dumped his clothes on the floor at the end of the night.

“What’s for dinner?” he asked when he came home from a shift, regardless of what time it was.

It used to drive me crazy, before he left me for Molly.

We would get into fights about it during which he would attribute his household laziness to the number of hours he worked in the hospital.

I knew that it went deeper than that. He had the demeanor of someone who had always been cared for, which was something I’d never experienced, not even before the murder.

In addition to being bad at cleaning, my parents didn’t know how to cook, and nearly all our meals came from restaurants.

Sometimes we went without eating completely.

I was six the first time I snuck into my dad’s wallet to steal cash in order to buy something for dinner from the convenience store down the street.

Hours spent in front of the television taught me that the way that we lived was abnormal.

Everyone on-screen had family dinners, clean houses, wholesome parents.

Though I couldn’t totally define it, I knew something was wrong in our house.

None of the places where we lived were the kinds of places where I could have my classmates over, which intensified my loneliness.

I deeply wanted to live somewhere like the homes on television, a spotless abode that was worthy of backyard barbecues and kids’ birthday parties.

The town house wasn’t exactly that, but it was a start.

When he left me, Noah and I had been months away from upgrading to something bigger.

I wanted a bathroom with two sinks. A room reserved for “entertaining,” even though I rarely had people over.

The kind of place people strolled past when walking their dogs and wondered who was lucky enough to be inside.

Molly couldn’t provide any of the things that I had provided.

She lived in an apartment that cost a disproportionate percentage of her salary, especially considering its small size.

Because of her online-shopping habit, the apartment was overflowing with her belongings.

She kept saying that she was going to donate stuff or move to a bigger spot, but I knew neither would ever happen.

Also, Molly hated to cook. She lived off protein shakes and the salads from a place near her work.

I was certain that, after a week of staying with her, Noah was starving.

Back at home, I started in the kitchen, chopping onions, potatoes, and garlic on a cutting board.

Noah always raved about his mother’s casseroles, and I’d witnessed the way that he’d devoured her food when we’d gone to visit.

His mother, in contrast, picked, birdlike, at her plate.

No one aside from me seemed to notice that her eating habits looked suspiciously similar to an eating disorder.

What do you think of my outfit? Rebecca texted a photo featuring an emerald green dress over tights, the combination of which was both fashionable and perfect for the winter weather.

You look amazing!!! I replied. Paul is going to love it!!!

I longed to tell her about my current predicament as I pulled on sheer black tights and a low-cut, backless dress, an outfit that I hoped suggested a date later in the evening.

One thing that people rarely mentioned about lying was how lonely it was.

I was reliant on a future in which my falsehoods had become the truth.

I imagined Rebecca and Paul on a double date with Noah and me.

How cute the four of us would be! People around us would be envious of our good looks.

How do I become one of them? they would wonder.

Thirty minutes before Noah was set to arrive, I stuck the casserole in the oven, arranged the bouquet that I’d purchased after my run-in with Aidan in a vase, and poured myself a glass of wine.

I left some clutter on the dining room table.

The scene needed to be enticing but not appear planned.

Never mind that I never made casseroles.

Never mind that I never lounged around the house alone, in a sexy dress, with a glass of wine poised between my fingers.

Never mind that I was possibly closer to hysteria than I’d ever been.