Page 31 of Matchmaking for Psychopaths

I wanted to text Rebecca after work, but she was on a date with Tyler. No doubt she was casting her spell over him the way that she’d done with Paul. I hoped that their relationship wouldn’t end with a man storming into my office.

With no one to call, I went home and tried to forget.

That was the key to surviving something horrific.

It wasn’t like I walked around thinking about how my parents were murderers all the time.

Over the years since their arrest, I’d found ways to dissociate.

Drugs and alcohol were an obvious way, but drinking too much was what led to divulging my secrets to Aidan, and I was wary of a repeat performance.

After their arrest, there were rumors that my parents had committed their murders in a drug-fueled craze.

People liked the theory because there was logic to it.

If they could pinpoint why my parents did what they did, then maybe they could prevent something similar from happening to themselves or their loved ones.

My parents did, on occasion, use drugs. I didn’t realize that until I was older.

I thought my parents acted strangely from time to time because they were strange people.

They weren’t addicts though. It could even be argued that they were less likely to kill while they were drunk or high, as they already had the rush that they needed.

I tended to stay away from harder substances, because losing control like that scared me.

Drinking, at least, was an acceptable form of recklessness.

My real method of escape was watching reality television.

That was something Molly and I had done together, but the hobby both predated and outlasted her presence in my life.

I got into my comfiest clothes—pajama shorts, thick socks, and an oversized sweatshirt that Noah had left behind—lit a candle, made a bowl of popcorn, settled beneath a fleece blanket on the couch, and let the dulcet sounds of women arguing wash over me.

It was like having a lobotomy. Within minutes, I was no longer concerned about my missing ex-fiancé, the psychopath who was threatening me, or the organ that had shown up at my house.

I was worried about the two housewives who were fighting because one had implied that the other wasn’t as rich as she claimed she was.

I fretted about the couple that had gotten engaged without ever having seen each other.

I developed anxiety for the two friends who were opening a restaurant together without any actual restaurant experience.

I noted, as did others online, when a cast member was looking very thin, and wondered whether that was an indicator that she had an eating disorder.

On the episode of Love on the Lake that I was watching now, the cast members decided that they needed to get away from their vacation home and visit a winery.

“I didn’t even know there were wineries around here,” one of them said.

“That’s because they’re not very good,” replied another.

They piled into a party bus together. I suspected that, legally, the show had an obligation to make sure that no one drove drunk.

Since the show’s premiere, several years prior, everyone had aged significantly, and they were desperately trying to stop it through a variety of fillers, which in many cases served only to make them look older.

Two of the women had children, who were occasionally shown on camera but otherwise spent their time with nannies.

As in most episodes of the show, in this episode the cast members were drunk in a beautiful locale, and absolutely furious with one another.

“I can’t believe you said that my party was tacky,” one woman hissed at another.

“I didn’t say it was tacky. Who told you that? I swear, I can’t trust anyone in this group,” the other woman responded.

It was possible that, at some point, the cast members’ friendships had been authentic.

I knew from social media that some of them spent time together when the show wasn’t filming, while others were excluded until the cameras picked up again.

Though I had little desire to be on television, to have my personal affairs aired in a space where everyone could see, I was envious of the forced friendships.

I longed to go on vacation with a group of women, all of us dressed in silly costumes.

Molly had never been willing to indulge in my fantasy.

“I’ve already used up my vacation days,” she said when I’d suggested that we go somewhere together.

She didn’t need me, because she had her family.

Molly’s mother planned family trips to Europe, where they took cute pictures in front of historic structures.

On one of the few trips that I took with my parents before their arrest, we’d had to abscond from our hotel in the middle of the night because they’d scammed their way into our room and had been caught.

If we had gone to Pisa, my mother never would’ve deigned to pretend to hold up the Leaning Tower with her finger.

Because I had no group of friends, and no family, to go on a trip with, I watched reality television.

I watched people fight, fall in love, cheat on one another.

I yelled, “Girl, break up with him!” more times than I could count.

I learned about fertility struggles, addiction, and trauma, intermixed with silly parties and nights at the club.

The cast members on television provided friendship without being friends. Kinship without being kin. They allowed me to function even as my life fell apart.

I’d dragged myself to bed after staying up too late and felt like I’d been asleep for only a couple of minutes when a noise woke me up.

That was a benefit of having a significant other or a pet—they gave middle-of-the-night sounds an explanation.

Noah frequently came home late, climbed into bed when I was sleeping.

Occasionally I stirred, but more often than not, I stayed asleep, because my body was confident in its safety.

I hadn’t realized how much of my attachment to being in a relationship with a man wasn’t about the man at all.

My eyes shot open. I tensed into stillness, listening for any additional sounds.

There, a clink, two objects knocking together.

Footsteps. In my grogginess, my first thought was that I was hearing my parents—my father, a zombie, accompanying my mother, a prisoner, to commit more murders.

I didn’t doubt that my father was capable of wooing women even in death.

I became a child again, too afraid to move or breathe.

I regretted making fun of the neighborhood busybody who was convinced that there were strange figures wandering the streets, breaking into cars and homes.

“I saw them,” she insisted. “They were trying car doors to see if they were unlocked. Criminals!” I’d chalked it up to paranoia or racism or both, and now the thieves had come for me.

I had no weapons. Surprisingly, my father disdained guns.

He said that they were the tools of weak, frightened people.

He thought that if people wanted to kill something, they should do it with their whole chest. That was one of the few things that we agreed upon.

Guns made it too easy to kill. Firearm owners with the best of intentions could end up killing their loved ones or themselves before they realized what was happening.

I didn’t want to be one of those people.

I didn’t want to kill. I just wanted the monsters to leave me alone.

I forced myself out of bed, pulling on a pair of shorts over my underwear.

I wasn’t a kid anymore. I couldn’t lie there waiting for a monster to come eat me.

What’s the worst that could happen ? The problem was that I knew.

The worst was that I could be cut into pieces and scattered throughout the woods.

A small, stupid part of me hoped that whoever— whatever —was downstairs was Noah, even though the sounds were different from the ones that he usually made.

Perhaps he’d been altered in our time apart, like when people were brought back to life in movies and they were unable to rid themselves of the touch of darkness.

I couldn’t let my hopefulness interfere with the feeling in my gut, the feeling that there was an intruder who wished me ill.

Cautiously, I opened the bedroom door and tiptoed down the hallway toward the stairs. I cringed as the floor creaked beneath my feet. There was a slamming sound that I recognized as that of the front door shutting. Whoever was in the house must’ve heard me.

No longer tiptoeing, I ran down the stairs.

There was one kind of fear, elicited by confronting an intruder, and another, from knowing that someone had been inside the house but not knowing who they were.

Neither was a fear I wanted to live with, but I needed answers.

I beelined to the door, and was met with a blast of cold air as I pushed it open and stepped into the night.

My bare feet sank into fresh snow, an unpleasant sensation.

The world was still around me—too still?

—with no sign of anything amiss, aside from a trail of footprints snaking away from my front door.

A detective might’ve been able to do something with that, but I didn’t trust the police.

I took another step in the snow. The cold burned.

I needed to put on boots. I thought of the footprints that Paul had dragged into the office, dirt mixed with blood.

I hadn’t understood how such a thing could happen, until my own desperation made me venture into the freezing weather in only a T-shirt and shorts.

I knelt to examine the prints. They were almost certainly made by boots, but there were no clear brand markings.

I put my own foot inside one print to gauge its size.

I had large feet for a woman, and the prints were bigger than mine, which could be an indication that the intruder was a man.

Aidan? He’d been so insistent that he didn’t want to hurt me, and a mere fifteen hours after our meeting, someone had broken into my home.

I thought of Paul again, his face close to mine.

I need to see Rebecca again. Had he somehow found my home address, his love transformed into rage?

It wouldn’t be the first time that such a thing had happened. All extreme emotions were related.

Unable to tolerate the cold any longer, I turned to go inside. Being in my house felt the same way that talking to my mother in prison did—simultaneously familiar and dangerous. Even if Noah and I didn’t get back together, it might be time to move.

The intruder’s handiwork was immediately apparent, and it made me wish they were a mere thief.

On top of the mantel, they’d arranged a village of tiny pink and red houses.

I’d seen a similar display at Noah’s parents’ house during Christmastime.

It’d been cute and unsettling, a perfect little village without any people.

In our own ways, we were all trying to create the worlds in which we wanted to live.

On my mantel there were a post office with a sign that said love letters , a pink bakery shaped like a cupcake, and a house with a glowing cutout heart in the middle.

It would’ve been nice if not for all the body parts scattered between them.

At first glance, I counted three fingers, a couple of toes, and several unidentified organs.

A string of pink lights cast a pale, eerie glow over it all.

I’d been awake for only a few minutes, but it was clear that whoever had done this had been there for a while.

It was the fingers that did it.

Molly was right when she said that I hadn’t let Noah in, not entirely, but there were ways in which we knew each other implicitly.

I recognized the sounds he made as he moved around the house, what it felt like when he climbed into bed next to me.

I was familiar with his exclamations of delight when he ate food that he enjoyed, and I could predict what kinds of shows he’d like to watch.

And, apparently, I knew his fingers, the specific way that his nails met their beds, and I recognized him in the body parts in front of me, in a way that I’d failed to recognize him in the heart.

It was Noah.

It had always been Noah.

And I’d buried his heart in the woods.