Page 49 of Matchmaking for Psychopaths

One month later

Aidan and I were seated at a metal table that was bolted to the floor. It was designed that way by people who understood that anything could be used as a weapon.

I sensed her presence before I saw her.

Mommy.

It was the kind of charisma that couldn’t be taught. Anyone who’d spent time with politicians or celebrities knew what it felt like, a force stronger and more inescapable than gravity.

“I knew you would come eventually,” my mother said as she took a seat across from us at the table.

The prison was located in the middle of nowhere. Most prisons were. Entire rural economic systems were built on locking people up. Aidan flew us to a nearby airport. It was in a different plane than the one he flew on our first ride. I knew better than to question where he’d acquired it.

I wore a plain black dress, a long-debated choice. I wanted my mother to think I was pretty. I wanted my mother to understand how I’d suffered for what she’d done. Ultimately, clothing that said what I wanted it to didn’t exist.

“I have someone I want you to meet,” I told her.

The mother from my memories was the most beautiful woman in the world.

I’d learned that a lot of people thought that of their mothers.

But mine really is, I wanted to insist. Prison had aged her.

Or time. Were those different things? A sentence always meant a number of years taken away.

Deep wrinkles were imprinted on her face, her dark hair streaked with gray.

I missed who she’d been before, the movie star who lived in my brain.

When she looked at Aidan, I saw that she still had that same gaze, the one that made men fall to their knees and made women agree to leave bars with two strangers. He’s mine. I wanted to snatch him away, put him in my pocket.

It had been my idea to visit my mother. Meeting-the-parents was a whole genre of romantic comedies.

There were wild mishaps, such as when the new partner accidentally caused structural damage to homes, destroyed cakes, and wounded siblings, only to become a beloved member of the family by the end of the movie.

Because my mother was in prison, I’d never been able to share such moments with Noah.

Because Aidan was a killer who was obsessed with my murderous parents, something new opened itself to me.

Or that was what I told Aidan. That was the nice version of my motive to see my mother.

A part of me was still stuck on Noah’s dismembered body.

Nothing new had arrived since Better Love had burned down with Nicole inside of it and Molly had been arrested for Noah’s murder.

Most of the time, I assumed that I’d solved the murder—it was Nicole and Molly, case closed.

But then there were those small moments when I couldn’t shake the feeling that my mother was somehow involved in the killing.

“You finally brought him,” my mother said as she drank Aidan in.

She had immediately forgotten the conversation in which I’d told her that my fiancé was dead and had been chopped into pieces.

She was always doing stuff like that—forgetting inconvenient truths in order to remember the world how she wanted it to be.

“How’s your fiancé?” she had asked during our next conversation. I was in the middle of a Vanderpump Rules rewatch with Rebecca and had excused myself to take the call outside. Eager to resume our viewing, I’d neglected to remind my mother of the bloody truth.

“He’s great,” I told her.

Now I was in front of her with a different man.

Noah would’ve folded beneath my mother’s gaze, but Aidan was unflinching. They measured each other up. I was grateful that he was seeing her this way, in an aged state. The last thing I needed was another rival for my mother’s love.

Watch this, I said to my parents as I crossed the monkey bars.

Watch this, I told them when I’d learned to read and write.

Watch this, I said as I misbehaved for the sole purpose of getting their attention.

It didn’t matter what I did. My father had eyes only for my mother, and my mother paid attention to me only during those hours when she wanted a daughter to do things with.

The rest of the time, I was invisible. Naturally, I’d assumed that it was my proximity to multiple murders that had warped my brain chemistry, but maybe the shift had occurred earlier.

Please love me, I’d begged and begged my parents. I couldn’t understand why they weren’t like the parents I saw in the movies we watched. Good. Wholesome. Frumpy, in a comforting way. No one wanted the people who raised them to be beautiful and powerful.

“You weren’t lying when you said he was good-looking,” my mother told me. She talked as if Aidan were a picture on the wall that both of us were looking at rather than a man in the room.

“This is exactly who I imagined you ending up with. Look at those arm muscles. That face. Smart too, a doctor. The two of you will have amazing children, the future of the species.”

“I’m a pilot, actually,” Aidan said.

My mother looked accusatorily in my direction.

“I thought you said he was a doctor.”

I scanned the room for vending machines.

I needed something to put in my mouth. Being in the same room as her made me want to swallow my tongue.

Sometimes I questioned myself. How bad could it really have been?

The answer revealed itself clearly: Bad, so bad.

I needed to escape. The room, however, was void of distractions.

There was only one visitor aside from Aidan and me, a man who wept as he told a jumpsuit-clad woman about their children.

“The doctor’s dead,” I reminded her.

My mother smiled at Aidan. There was a glimmer of the person I remembered, the woman so beautiful that she could put anyone under her spell.

“Has my daughter ever told you how I met her father?”

“No,” Aidan said.

I rolled my eyes, settling in to hear the same story that I’d heard again and again. The romantic comedy of my parents’ lives. The horror story of someone else’s.

“I was out to dinner with my husband, and Peter—”

“Your husband?” I interrupted. “I thought it was just some guy you were dating.”

“I mean, he was just some guy. Being married doesn’t mean that he was important.”

All that lore that I carried around in my head…

It was jarring to learn that part of it was wrong.

There was a phenomenon, the Mandela effect, of people collectively remembering details about the past in a particular way, only to find out that they had those details wrong.

Nelson Mandela didn’t die in prison, the Berenstain Bears always had ‘stain’ in their name, and my mother had left a man she was legally linked to in order to be with my father.

Had she lied or had I misremembered? How many times had I interpreted the world, myself, as I wanted it to be rather than the truth?

“I thought that you and Dad eloped three weeks after you met. How did you do that if you were married?”

She grinned at me. I could almost swear that her teeth were sharp like a vampire’s. I attributed that to prison dental work.

“Well, because my husband was dead, of course.”

Her eyes locked onto mine. No wonder she hadn’t cared when I told her that my ex-fiancé had been chopped into pieces.

It was the same thing that had happened to her first husband.

The generational curse—the generational gift—repeating itself again and again.

Trying to change the outcome was like going to a fortune teller, then doing everything possible to avoid the predicted fate, only for the avoidance to be the very thing that brings the predicted fate about.

I’d been so determined to be with someone ordinary, to be ordinary myself. I hadn’t realized that my mother had done the same thing. The tornado could only be a tornado. The snake, a snake.

I understood what had happened without needing my mother to elaborate.

My parents met that night at the restaurant and knew they were supposed to be together, and they’d eliminated the person who was standing in their way.

Everyone assumed that they murdered only women.

That was because of a bias that wasn’t limited to my parents’ crimes but extended to death as a whole.

Didn’t people recognize that men were mortal too?

Do you really want to be with me? Then prove it.

It was a grand gesture. The grandest of gestures.

Would you kill to be with me?

Better than a public declaration of love, it was an act of violence that irrevocably tied them together. No wonder my mother sneered at other women.

They think they know love, but they don’t.

Up until that moment, I had doubted her viciousness.

Mothers weren’t murderers. They were nurturers, victims, but never killers.

It had been easier to pin the killing on the father who hadn’t loved me the way that I wanted to be loved.

Lots of people had terrible fathers. Having a monstrous mother was more difficult to comprehend.

My mother didn’t go along with what my father wanted to do; rather, she pushed him to do what she wanted.

My father might have written a manifesto, but behind every manuscript penned by a man was the woman supporting him.

The first kill had been about my father proving his love to my mother.

It was possible that all the other ones were too.

I only love you, Lydia. I only want you, Lydia. This woman means nothing to me. I will kill everyone in the world if that’s what it takes to show the depth of my devotion.

They hadn’t escalated to killing later in their relationship. Their relationship had started with death. It was the only way that they knew how to process things, their method of showing devotion.

“Did you kill Noah?” I asked.

“Don’t be rude. Didn’t I teach you not to interrupt me when I’m telling a story? So, I was in a restaurant, and Peter came up to me—”