Page 41 of Matchmaking for Psychopaths

I jumped. The letter opener slipped out from between my fingers, fell to the floor, and disappeared from sight.

“I didn’t mean to scare you,” a female voice said.

It took my brain a moment to process what was happening.

I’d been so prepared for Aidan that I didn’t know what to do with this person, this woman.

When my eyes had adjusted to the dim light, I realized that it was Nicole.

The alarm hadn’t beeped, which meant she’d been there the whole time, watching me grope through the dark.

“Nicole? What the fuck? What are you doing here?” I asked.

She was wearing one of her heart-patterned sweaters. A big red bow adorned the top of her head. She looked like a child.

“I asked you here,” she replied, like it was obvious.

“What do you mean, you asked me here?”

“We need to figure this out, Lexie,” she said.

“Figure what out? What did you do with Noah?”

“The situation between us. The future of Better Love. Right now, we’re at an impasse.

We both want to be director, and Serena is dragging her feet.

It’s that mother instinct in her. She doesn’t know when to let go.

She knows that I’m the right person for the job, but for some reason she doesn’t want to hurt you.

Meanwhile, you’re pulling us all down. I had to show her how dangerous it was to have you around, the damage that she’s doing by continuing to placate your feelings. ”

My jaw dropped. Of all the possibilities—Aidan, Molly, Paul, my mother, a supernatural monster—I’d thought Nicole was the least likely.

I hadn’t thought her capable of brutality.

I disliked her, sure, thought her deranged in her normalcy.

No one was cutesy like that on the inside. All of us were cynical, suffering.

“That was you?” I thought back to everything that had happened. The flowers, the destruction of the Better Love lobby, the pieces of Noah’s corpse. “What did you do to Noah? Was it you who killed him, or someone else?”

“I have no idea where your ex-fiancé is,” she said glibly.

“I assume that he’s off somewhere trying to stay away from you.

I can’t imagine what it was like dating you for all those years.

I would need a break too. It was Ethan’s idea to mention him in the text message.

He said it would be a good way to get you here, and he was right. ”

My brain worked to parse what she was saying. Nicole claimed she hadn’t killed Noah. Could it have been Ethan—her husband—who was responsible for his death?

“So you didn’t”—I paused, trying to think of the right way to phrase the question—“send anything to my house?”

Nicole’s nose wrinkled.

“Your house? No. I just sent you the flowers and redecorated the lobby. Did you like it? I hoped that it would remind you of your childhood home.”

I tried to put the puzzle pieces of Nicole’s confession together. I was so sure that everything was connected. They were too similar to each other to be a coincidence.

“Were you working by yourself?” I asked.

Nicole smiled coyly.

“I might’ve had a couple of little elves helping me out.

Ethan, for one. He’s here now too, helping me with a project outside.

Isn’t that the most romantic thing you’ve ever heard?

He’s willing to sacrifice Valentine’s Day to help me with my career goals.

You can only imagine what it feels like to be loved like this. ”

Nicole was becoming recontextualized in front of me. I’d thought her a boring, vapid woman. Perhaps it was wrong of me to judge another woman like that, but it would be unreasonable to expect me to like every woman solely because of my gender. Men weren’t condemned for hating one another.

I’d taken Nicole’s frequent comments about psychopaths, and the way that she cast shade in my clients’ direction or asked intrusive questions about their private lives, as a sign of jealousy.

I’d forgotten that the people who most liked to label others as psychopaths were most likely to be psychopaths themselves, the same way that people who said things like I hate drama were ultimately the most dramatic people of all.

I hadn’t thought of her in that way because I hadn’t thought her capable of violence, and now I saw that I’d been wrong.

She wanted to hear about my clients because she saw something familiar in them, like a wolf howling into the distance toward a mate that only it could see.

“You’re a psychopath,” I said. It was a statement that I was more certain of than that her hair was blond. However, Nicole refused to accept the diagnosis.

“I am not. You are. I know all about you, Lexie, all the things that you’ve been hiding.

I know that you haven’t been with Noah in weeks.

I know that you’ve been forcing your clients to hang out with you as though they’re your friends.

It’s pathetic—that’s what it is. I tried to tell Serena, but she wouldn’t listen.

‘Alexandra wouldn’t do that,’ she told me.

She doesn’t know how deep your problems go. She doesn’t know about your parents.”

I froze. Nicole might not have killed Noah; I’d forgotten about the part where the note writer knew my secrets.

“My parents?”

“I did some snooping. Name changes are public record, you know. I discovered that you haven’t always been Alexandra Smith. You used to be Alexandra Schwartz, daughter of Peter and Lydia Schwartz. Your parents were—what was the term? Oh yeah, ‘serial lust murderers.’?”

I listened to Nicole detail their crimes.

She delighted in talking about them. She knew all the gory details.

I could tell that she’d done her research, spent hours and hours of her precious life learning exactly how my parents seduced women before they slaughtered them.

All this time I’d thought she hated me, and now I realized that she was obsessed.

It could be argued that her obsession was something akin to love.

“Okay, Nicole. You know about my parents. So what? I was a kid. It had nothing to do with me. Yes, I changed my name, but not because I was hiding the truth. I just didn’t want to be associated with them anymore. You can tell Serena. I don’t think it’ll get you the results you want.”

It stung to think about Serena learning about my parents, but it wouldn’t be the end of the world.

It would be just another way in which I’d disappointed her, in a string of disappointments.

There was nothing I could do to truly upset my own parents, like other people did with theirs, so I had to find new people to let down.

“I thought you might say something like that. Serena’s biggest fault is that she’s too forgiving, which is why I came up with a backup plan,” Nicole said.

I recognized the tone of her voice. It was the same as Molly’s when she told me that she and Noah were in love—the squeal of a person excited to deliver bad news.

“What? Are you going to release a herd of snails in Serena’s office or something?”

“No,” she said. “I’m going to burn down Better Love.”

It was then that I identified the whiff of gasoline. I’d mistakenly thought that the chemical scent in the air was caused by the new paint on the walls. I was so bad at sniffing out danger.

I laughed. That’s what I did when people made ludicrous statements about their intent to destroy me.

“You’re going to burn Better Love down? Why? What is that going to do?”

“I need to convince Serena of the danger that you and your clients pose. It’s nice that she’s accepting and all that, but it’s not the kind of business that the investors want.

Serena might be powerful here, but she’s small potatoes compared to who she’s been talking to.

They have real money. Have you ever flown in a private jet?

Me neither. But I’m going to. Serena will make me director, and I’ll show them who does the real work around here.

I have a plan for Better Love. We’re going to pivot, become more exclusive—a matchmaking service for the rich and the beautiful. ”

I didn’t bother telling her that many of the rich and beautiful were psychopaths, and it was their money and power that allowed them to get away with their bad behavior.

“You didn’t think this through,” I replied. “What are you going to do? Burn down Better Love and tell everyone that I did it? Great plan, Nicole. I’ll just tell them the truth.”

“No,” she said, and lifted her sweater to reveal a gun in a holster. “I’m going to shoot you and then burn the place down. Ethan’s surrounding the building with gasoline right now. Everyone will think you were a victim of your own crime.”

I’d forgotten that Nicole was one of those gun women. She’d told everyone in the office when Ethan had purchased her the firearm; she’d squealed like it was a diamond necklace. The two of them liked to go to shooting ranges together. She thought that made her hot.

Nicole took the gun out of the holster and pointed it at me. Even if she hadn’t practiced at the firing range, it was a close shot.

“What about the cameras? There are cameras in the lobby,” I said, and gestured at the device implanted on the ceiling.

“You really do think I’m stupid, don’t you? I disabled the cameras. It wasn’t hard. Serena’s not exactly a tech genius.”

“You don’t know what something like this does to you, Nicole. It changes you. Everything you do for the rest of your life will be colored by this moment. You get to choose who you are tomorrow. Do you want to be yourself, or do you want to be a killer?”

I gave my final plea. Nicole’s smirk showed that she was unconvinced.

“I want to be director,” she said. She looked at me like I was a target. Point of view: I was a bull’s-eye.

“I won’t miss working with you, Lexie,” Nicole said as the safety clicked off.