Page 50 of Matchmaking for Psychopaths

“Did you chop him into little pieces and leave him at my house? Are you trying to frame me? Or is this how you show your love?”

“I don’t know why you’re talking about something so gruesome when I’m trying to tell this lovely gentleman here a story,” my mother snapped.

I saw now that it had been a mistake to come here.

There was nothing that my mother could give me.

I’d continued to talk to her out of a sense of obligation.

I’d continued to talk to her because I wanted her to love me.

More than any of that, I’d talked to her because I felt guilty about what I’d done.

I was responsible for her incarceration.

She would never be released, and I’d never paid for what I’d done.

The least I could do was tolerate a weekly phone call.

As I looked at my mother, her face twisted into a snarl, I decided my debt was paid.

I was done. I was never going to get the answers I was looking for, and my mother was never going to be the mother I wanted her to be.

I needed to say the thing that I’d been putting off for all those years.

As long as it was unspoken, I’d forever be in my mother’s grip.

If I voiced it out loud, then I could finally be free.

“I framed you,” I said, interrupting her depiction of the first time she and my father had sex.

That got her attention.

“I was mad at you and Dad. You were bad parents. It hurt me when you left me alone. And I knew you were killing people. How could you do that while I was home? Didn’t you care about me?

Never mind. I don’t care. I killed that woman, the one the police found.

That’s what you and Dad taught me, killing as problem-solving.

I hope that you’re happy with yourself. What’s that saying? ‘You reap what you sow.’?”

Another phrase: “Fuck around and find out.”

My mother wasn’t quiet, but neither was she forming words. Instead, garbled vowels emerged from her mouth. Her face grew so red that I thought she might explode. She stood up, and finally the sounds arranged themselves in the correct order.

“Guards! Arrest this woman! She framed me! My daughter framed me!”

She screamed. It wasn’t all that different from the sound of death. After all, something was dying—the house we’d assembled together, dismantled brick by brick.

The guards didn’t care. They’d heard it all before.

They weren’t the judge or the jury. Their only duty was to keep my mother locked up.

And she was locked up, I reminded myself, taking a deep breath as the heavy metal door of the prison released me back into the world with a jarring beep.

There was only so much she could do to hurt me.

“I think you did the right thing,” Aidan told me when we were back on the plane.

“Was she everything that you hoped?” I asked.

The distance between us and the ground made me feel safe. I was willing to risk the wrath of gravity if it meant escaping from my mother.

“I told you, I don’t care about her. She led me to you, and now that I’m here, you’re the only thing that matters.”

I still hadn’t fully adjusted to Aidan’s predilection for speeches about how devoted he was to me. Noah had been more of a silent Midwestern type. I hoped that eventually I would be able to believe fully.

“There was one thing that I wanted to do while we were there that I didn’t get to,” Aidan said.

“Did you want a prison tour?”

“No, I wanted to give you this.”

He whipped a box out of his pocket. My heart started to thump. I didn’t trust gift boxes. Anything could be inside. A toe. An ear. A finger.

Aidan opened the box.

It was a ring.

“I’m sorry that flying the plane makes it impossible to get down on one knee. I don’t want to wait to do this. Alexandra, you’re the most exciting woman I’ve ever met. I know that we’ve only been together for a short period of time, but I don’t want to wait to start my future with you.”

He was a psychopath who’d become obsessed with my parents after committing a murder of his own, everything that I said that I didn’t want in a man.

I was supposed to marry Noah, who’d been perfect on paper.

He was a doctor, handsome, and fit, and yet our relationship hadn’t worked in practice.

Things were wrong before Molly interfered.

Things were wrong before he was chopped into pieces.

I’d always thought that love was a conscious choice.

People fit together because of their temperaments, their likes and dislikes, and their goals.

Looking at Aidan, I realized how wrong I’d been.

I loved him in spite of all his flaws. I loved him so much that his flaws no longer seemed so wrong.

He’d killed for me. We’d killed together and covered up the crime.

There was no part of myself that I had to hide from him, no aspect I needed to make more palatable.

He wanted me for who I was: the daughter of serial murderers. A murderer myself. A psychopath.

“Yes, yes, yes,” I said.

That was when the tears fell down my own cheeks. Aidan had cracked me open, the box in my brain where I kept all my feelings in shards on the floor. It was beautiful and painful at once. My path to true love hadn’t been ordinary, but then, they didn’t make movies about ordinary people.

Aidan slid the ring onto my finger. It fit perfectly, unlike the one that Noah had given me, which needed to be resized because it was too large.

Normally, I would’ve said that didn’t mean anything.

It wasn’t a sign. In that moment, though, the ring became a symbol for everything. Aidan and I were meant to be.