Page 46 of Matchmaking for Psychopaths

In the morning I woke to a text from Serena.

No one is coming to the office today. More information to come. Sending us a text message gave away the urgency of the situation, as Serena abhorred text messages. Real connection, she liked to say, wasn’t built that way.

After we finished our multiple lovemaking sessions, Aidan and I showered together, wiping off all evidence of our crimes.

Aidan was tender as he scrubbed my back.

I wasn’t self-conscious in front of him.

For the first time in my life, I was romantically involved with someone who knew my darkest secrets.

With the right person, it was a comfort to be seen.

I’d always wondered how my parents managed to sleep after their violent acts.

Aside from imprisonment, insomnia was one of the main concerns in connection with immorality, hence the question How do you sleep at night?

As I collapsed back onto the hotel bed, I got it.

Murder was exhausting, even when it was done with a gun.

After Serena’s text, Aidan and I got breakfast, and then went to the mall for a shopping spree, to buy replacements for the clothes and outerwear that we’d worn the night before.

I wasn’t about to leave anything to chance.

I still wasn’t sure where we were—somewhere with strip malls and diners and beach-themed restaurants with names like Dickie’s Crab Leg.

Midmorning, I received a link to a virtual meeting. I took the meeting in the hotel room, using a filter to hide the background.

Serena wasn’t wearing makeup. In all my years of working for her, this was the first time that I’d seen her real face.

It was astonishing how much her bare face aged her.

I was someone who often pretended to be someone she wasn’t, and it turned out that I wasn’t the only one.

All of us were pretending in our own way.

“Something horrible has happened,” she said. “I wish there were some easier way to say this, but there’s not. I need…I need to get it out before I can’t. There was an incident last night at the Better Love office. Unfortunately, Nicole was injured and killed in the course of this incident.”

The receptionist hadn’t muted herself, and her gasp was loud and disruptive.

“The police are investigating what happened,” Serena continued.

“They think…they think it was a murder-suicide, as her husband, Ethan, was also found at the scene. Effective immediately, Better Love is on hiatus while I evaluate the future of the company. Now I’ll do my best to answer any questions you might have. ”

The other matchmakers sought comfort from our mother duck. They murmured condolences, which I echoed in an effort to appear sad, though when I prodded my emotions, I discovered that I wasn’t.

Since I’d gotten the job, I’d told everyone how much I enjoyed being a matchmaker.

“You know, it’s refreshing to find someone who actually enjoys what they do,” Noah’s mother had told me after explaining that Noah thought women should stay at home and raise children.

I realized, however, that something had changed when I realized I wasn’t getting the director position.

There was no room for me to grow. I would continue to match people, and the matches would work out or they wouldn’t.

Maybe I was using other people’s love to make up for the lack of it in my own life.

In any case, the job no longer fulfilled my ambitions. I needed something more.

The building hadn’t burned down completely, but from an insurance position it was a total loss.

Serena didn’t mention the investors. I suspected that they’d been scared away.

Matchmaking wasn’t a business for the faint of heart.

I refrained from asking about the state of the bodies, though that was what I really wanted to know.

Had Nicole’s pretty little face been burned to a crisp?

It was strange to consider that, after all the hours that I’d spent there, I would never sit at my desk again, that the office no longer existed as I’d known it.

Perhaps I could’ve done more to save it if we hadn’t been so busy trying to frame Nicole and Ethan for their own deaths, but a girl needed to take care of her own self first.

“I have to go home,” I told Aidan.

He nodded.

“Whatever you need,” he said, and I believed him.

We went straight from the airport to the woods.

It didn’t escape me that that was the sort of thing that my parents had done together.

The difference was that they’d had bodies in the back of their car.

Aidan and I were doing the reverse of what my parents had done.

We were going to the woods to get parts of a person back.

I expected it to be difficult to figure out where I’d left Noah’s body parts, but a map to the location was burned into my memory. The various body parts had held up surprisingly well, due to the cold.

“What is this?” Aidan asked, picking up one of the organs.

“I don’t know. A liver maybe? Noah was the doctor.”

“Do you really think it’s him?”

I held up one of the fingers.

“This is how I knew. It looks like him. Does that make any sense?”

“Yes. I would know your fingers. I would definitely know your heart.”

I smiled.

“It’s okay, you know, if you feel sad. You were engaged to someone, and now he’s in pieces. That’s a weird thing for anyone to go through.”

“I was lonely when he left,” I admitted.

“I was in denial after I found out about the affair. I couldn’t let myself be sad, because if I was sad, then it was real, and I couldn’t accept that.

I was so certain that he was going to come back.

I thought that I was this grand master of love, and instead, I was just like everyone else.

His death made me see that. This might sound horrible, but sometimes I wonder whether I was mourning the loss of him or the idea of our relationship.

I wanted to be the person that he thought I was so much, and then I just wasn’t. ”

“It’s not horrible. That’s what loss is. The death of a person you love turns you into someone else, and grieving them becomes a grief for the person you used to be,” Aidan replied.

Strolling through the woods was almost like a date—“almost,” because I was still so close to Noah’s death that being with Aidan felt like a betrayal.

It was funny—I’d killed two people and could move through the world without issue, but Noah continued to be sticky.

The difference was in the choices that I’d made versus the ones that were made for me.

“I’m thinking of going back to school,” I told Aidan.

“What for?”

“I want to become a therapist. That’s what I wanted to do originally, and I lost focus somewhere.”

“No more matchmaking?”

“No. I think I’ve accomplished all that I can in that particular role.”

“I’m not sure there’s a higher pinnacle than this,” Aidan agreed. “You might as well go out on top.”

Once we’d retrieved Noah’s parts, we drove back to the city.

“I have an address for you,” I told Aidan, and showed him where Molly lived.

Rebecca had been blowing up my phone all day.

Better Love had sent an email to all of our clients, notifying them of the fire and the “temporary” closure.

There was nothing about Nicole and her husband in the email, though it didn’t take much digging in the local newspaper to find information about them.

OMG I heard what happened. Are you okay?

Wasn’t Nicole the coworker that you hated? It’s so wild that she died.

You better answer me soon or I’m getting in my car and driving over there.

“Who are you texting?” Aidan asked as I responded to the flurry of messaging.

“My best friend,” I told him, and then amended, “My new best friend. She actually started as a client of mine. I thought about matching her with you.”

Talking about that made me uneasy. I was suddenly paranoid that Rebecca and Aidan were meant to be together and I was simply a stand-in until they met. That was one of the many difficulties of being hurt by someone close—it made it impossible to really trust anyone ever again.

“Her father was murdered,” I continued. “We go to this support group together, Children of Murdered Parents. That’s where I realized I want to be a therapist. There are people out there who need me.”

“Do the other group members know who your parents are?” he asked.

I shook my head.

“They know how my father died.”

One of the nice things about Aidan was that I didn’t have to explain anything to him. At first it scared me how much he knew about my parents, as if I were a mere fetish for him, but in practice, I found that it equated to understanding.

“You’re the only person in my life who knows the whole truth,” I told him. “Molly knows part of it, everything up to the arrest. And we’re about to take care of her.”