Page 26 of Matchmaking for Psychopaths

“I’m here to tell you how interested I am in the director position,” I told her.

I pushed all the noise aside—Noah, the heart, Aidan…

It wasn’t especially difficult. I’d lived a life of compartmentalization.

One moment, I was Alexandra, whose life was forever marked by murder.

The next, I was Lexie, normal girl in the world.

We all did what we needed to do in order to pass as ordinary.

I thought about what I’d overheard Nicole saying in her conversation with Serena.

You’re basically like a second mom to me.

Motherhood was used both to compliment and to demean women.

It implied the deepest of bonds, but it was also used to justify excluding women from the upper echelons of the workforce.

Serena looked nothing like the snarling, screaming woman the police had taken away in handcuffs; she sounded completely different from the person who berated me over the phone from the prison where she’d lived for twenty years.

Nevertheless, I couldn’t let Nicole win.

“You’re a mom to me,” I forced through my lips.

I removed the “like” and the “second.” I invented a world where Serena was my mom.

A person who had never committed murder.

A person who wouldn’t leave her small children hungry and alone for days on end.

Despite all her care, her son is still a psychopath, the voice in my brain reminded me.

Yes, but he’s one of the good psychopaths, I replied, and pushed the voice away.

I continued.

“In my time here, I’ve worked with difficult clients.

I’ve successfully matched people who were uncertain that they could ever hold a committed relationship.

Those same people have gone on to get married, have babies.

Through our work, we’ve fundamentally altered the courses of their lives, and I’m so glad that these services will not just be offered here, but all over the country. ”

A small part of me hoped that I would deliver my speech and Serena would pass over the keys. Of course you’re my pick for the next director. It’s always been you. I just didn’t have the heart to break it to Nicole yet. That wasn’t what she did.

“I appreciate your application, Lexie. I know how dedicated you are to your clients. You’re definitely one of the names that I’m considering for the director role.”

I put a smile on my face. If I were on Love on the Lake , the scene would’ve cut to a confessional in which I wore a dress with a million straps and had perfect makeup.

Yeah, I’m disappointed, I would’ve said. Don’t get me wrong. I love Serena, but sometimes she’s bad at reading people. She didn’t know her own son was a psychopath, after all!

The audience would’ve eaten it up. #hirelexie would be trending. Competing matchmaking companies would’ve offered me jobs. As it was, I had no audience. I could only advocate for myself.

“Thank you so much,” I said.

I stood up. The room spun a little. I felt so incredibly alone.

I stopped to pick up takeout on my way home. I was tired in a way that didn’t equate to sleepiness. I braced myself as the town house came into view. Would something else be waiting for me? A liver or, worse, a brain? I didn’t have the energy to return to the woods.

Unexpectedly, there was an entire body at my door. Unlike the delivery the day before, this one was living and identifiable. It was Molly.

I parked my car in the driveway. What was she doing here?

The Molly I’d originally met had been nonconfrontational.

She had a prettiness that she struggled to acknowledge, and though she was outgoing, she backed down at any sign of a struggle.

Until she’d stolen my fiancé, I’d considered myself the dominant one in our friendship.

I typically picked what we did, where we ate, and what we watched, and not in a mean-girl sense but because I knew what I wanted when she didn’t.

Slowly, over the course of years, Molly gained confidence.

There were women, like Nicole, who would never be better-looking than they were in high school.

Someone like Molly got hotter as she aged, largely because she was away from the stringent rules that dictated beauty for teenagers.

Without my realizing, she’d gone from deferential to being someone with the capacity to steal my man.

And now she blocked my entrance to my home.

I got out of the car with my food, aware of how every minute spent outside made it colder.

I recognized the look on Molly’s face. It was the expression she wore when she’d had to deal with a coworker she hated or when her Starbucks order was wrong.

She was angry, and that anger was pointed at me.

I couldn’t totally blame her. I’d elicited the emotion by sending her that text message after Noah and I hooked up, but I’d assumed that she’d point the rage at him.

Women were so eager to claim that they were “girls’ girls,” until men got in the way.

“Is he here?” she demanded as I approached her.

“Who?” I asked, playing dumb.

“You know who,” she said. The words were enough to provoke tears. It seemed unfair that she was crying when she was the one who stole my fiancé. She’d sacrificed the right to empathy the first time they slept together.

“Do you mean you lost him already?” I was jubilant and puzzled at the same time. It had been a mere week and a half, and already the two of them had disintegrated. My instincts had been right—Noah and Molly were no match in love. They should’ve listened to the person who knew better.

“It’s all your fault,” she said. She took a step toward me. I’d never known Molly to be a violent person—she refused to watch movies in which children or animals got hurt—but there was something new in her stance: a threat.

“You couldn’t let me have this one thing. Everything has to be about you. You can’t accept when you’re not the center of attention. Guess what, Lexie. It’s not ‘main-character energy.’ It’s just being a bitch.”

Molly was confused. I’d fought to get where I was.

The biggest struggle she’d faced in life was thinking that she was ugly, when she was actually relatively attractive.

Sure, she’d faced depression, and her parents were divorced—run-of-the-mill sorts of things—but my parents were killers.

Nothing had ever been normal for me. For me, just getting up in the morning and going to work was breaking a kind of generational curse.

“He’s my fiancé,” I said softly. “We love each other.”

Molly got an incredulous look on her face.

“You want to believe that you love each other. You’ve painted this picture in your head of what your life is, and Noah matches that image. It’s not real though. He doesn’t know who your parents are, Lexie. He doesn’t know who you are. How can you keep something like that a secret?”

“Did you tell him?” I dropped any pretense of friendliness.

Molly was an obstacle. Revealing my parents’ identity was a brick wall.

There were people, maybe, who could get over something like that.

There were even those who got off on it.

Noah wasn’t in either of those categories.

He looked cookie-cutter because that was what he was.

He didn’t know what to do with people who didn’t fit a preordained shape.

She shook her head.

“No. No, but I will if you don’t leave him alone.”

“He’s never going to marry you, you know,” I told her. “He might fuck you, say that he loves you, but you’re not what he wants. He wants me. I think that what we did on Saturday night is proof enough of that.”

Her hand met my cheek before I realized what was happening. Molly’s eyes widened in surprise as I touched my stinging skin. I doubted that she’d ever hit anyone before. She didn’t live the kind of life in which she had to fight.

“Is he here?” she asked again. “I tried knocking, and no one answered.”

“No,” I admitted. “He’s not here. I last saw him on Saturday night.”

Molly crumpled at that.

“Where is he? We got into an argument on Saturday, after you sent that text. He said that he ‘needed time,’ and left my apartment. I haven’t heard from him since then.”

Beneath the anger, I sensed her humiliation.

She’d put everything on the line for Noah, had betrayed her best friend, and he’d given her so little in return, a single week of togetherness.

Men just wanted to know that women were willing to do such a thing, and hated it when they actually went through with it.

It put too much pressure on the situation.

Nothing thrived in an environment like that.

“I haven’t seen him either. He’s not here.” How I wished that I could say otherwise. It burned that Noah had left Molly and hadn’t immediately come running to me. Maybe she and I had both been wrong. Maybe he didn’t belong with either of us.

“I don’t know what to do,” she cried. Her tears begged for comfort, and I refused to give it.

That kind of relationship was over between us, regardless of what was happening with Noah.

I didn’t need her anymore, not when I had Rebecca.

In retrospect, it seemed like Molly had been a placeholder while I was waiting for something real.

“Should I call the police?” she asked.

The suggestion was alarming. One night, Noah had been at my house, and the next, I’d received what looked like a human heart.

I’d buried it in the woods, done my best to scrub surfaces clean of the evidence, but it was impossible to cover any trail completely.

Wherever Noah was, I didn’t want the police to come sniffing around the town house.

“I think that’s a little bit dramatic. It’s not like he’s missing . I’m sure that he’s just at a friend’s house or something. He can sleep anywhere.”

That was a required skill for a medical resident.

Their hours were so precious that they needed to be able to conk out wherever they lay down to rest. It was why it’d been so easy for Noah to make the transition to Molly’s house from mine.

I was confident that Noah was sleeping on a couch somewhere. Well, mostly confident.

“You didn’t send me something, did you?” I asked Molly. She stood there, uncertain of what to do with her body.

“Why would I send you something?” she asked. “What are you talking about?”

The anger had returned. I could’ve said anything and she would’ve hated me.

It occurred to me then that the resentment had started long before my birthday and I’d missed it.

I didn’t know the exact timeline of her affair with Noah, but they’d implied that it had been going on for months.

I thought of all the evenings that we’d spent watching reality television together during that time frame, the way that she’d questioned me about my relationship, going so far as to say “Are you sure you want to get married? It’s a lot easier to call off a wedding than it is to get divorced” when I’d complained about how much time Noah needed to be at work.

The clarity of hindsight was painful. She wanted me to end things so she could have him for herself.

Our friendship had meant nothing to her.

“I need to go inside. I don’t think that I owe you this, but I’ll let you know if I hear from Noah. I’m sure that he’s fine. If you’re really worried, you can call the hospital. He’d rather die than miss a shift at work.”

Molly accepted none of my graciousness. She narrowed her eyes at me.

“You better not have done something to him,” she said. “Don’t forget, I know all about you, Lexie. Stuff like that can be genetic, you know.”

I glared at her.

“I can’t believe I ever thought you were my best friend. I’m going inside, and I expect you to leave.”

I stepped through the door and shut it before she could say anything else.

I didn’t want her to see that her comments had rattled me.

I hadn’t done anything to Noah, but I had received a human heart, delivered to my house a day after the last time either of us had seen him, and it was starting to settle in that those two events might somehow be related.