Page 52 of Matchmaking for Psychopaths

The wedding

I always knew that Noah would attend my wedding; I just thought that he would be the groom.

As I rooted through the box that was delivered to the bridal suite, my fingers met hair.

Despite the humanlike texture, I hoped that the object was a stuffed animal until I spotted the skin below. That was when I shrieked.

It was his head. It was my wedding day, and someone had delivered me the head of my ex-fiancé.

Had I misjudged Aidan? I’d known him less than five months, and there we were, legally binding ourselves together forever.

If it was Aidan, he’d done an exceptional job of hiding the body part.

Since the night that Better Love burned down, we’d spent nearly all of our time together, excepting when he was at work.

When I’d gone into his freezer for ice cream, there were no frozen heads.

There were no bones in the linen closet.

Would it change things if he had been the one to wrap up my ex-fiancé’s skull with a pretty bow and deliver it to my door?

When two people who’d committed murder were engaged, what kind of thing was bad enough to be a deal-breaker?

Rebecca burst into the room.

“I heard you scream. Are you okay?”

“I got a gift,” I said, and gestured to the box.

She looked down at it.

“Something good?”

“It’s Noah’s head.”

I expected Rebecca to express surprise or confusion. What do you mean, it’s Noah’s head? She did none of that. She stared at me and raised an eyebrow.

“Well? Do you like it?”

I got the same feeling I’d had when we were skidding off the highway in her car.

I tried to apply the brake, but I wasn’t the one who was driving.

My mouth was dry. I didn’t want to voice it.

I wanted to shove the truth into that metal box in my brain and lock it away forever.

But some things were unavoidable, particularly when those things were standing right in front of you.

“It was you,” I said. “You were the one who killed him. You were the one who left pieces of him at my door, and broke into my house.”

Rebecca grinned at me. She was proud. How frustrating it must have been for her to watch me spin my wheels when it was her the whole time.

“I did it for you. As a gift.”

“Why would you do that? You didn’t even know him.”

I looked back down at the head. It was well-preserved.

Noah must’ve been kept in a freezer. I recalled the night when Rebecca and I had eaten ice cream in her apartment.

Was it body-freezer ice cream, or had he been somewhere separate?

What a thrill that must’ve been for her, comforting me over the death of a man she’d killed herself.

“Noah was all wrong for you, even before he left you for Molly. I couldn’t believe it when that happened. What a fucking joke,” she said.

“But how did you know?”

I tried to assemble the timeline. Noah had left me for Molly on a Saturday. I was first introduced to Rebecca’s existence at the intake meeting on Monday. When Noah disappeared the following Saturday, she was still under the impression that we were engaged.

“Lexie, come on. You didn’t really think that I went to Better Love because I wanted a boyfriend, did you?

I can get a boyfriend anytime I want, which I don’t.

Who wants to be tied down like that? I mean, I guess Paul did.

Don’t worry—I took care of him after he harassed you at work. That was so rude of him.”

Paul? I hadn’t thought of him in months. Compared with the staged murder-suicide of Nicole and Ethan, his appearance had been an unsettling blip. He’d been so destroyed the last time I saw him, so eager to see Rebecca again. “I’ll do anything,” he said, and she took it literally.

“I went to Better Love because I wanted to meet you officially,” Rebecca continued. “Imagine how delighted I was when you showed up at COMP later in the week.”

No. All of that was wrong. I’d been the conductor of our relationship. I’d been vulnerable the week that Rebecca arrived. I needed a friend, and there she was. I’d combed through her social media in an effort to learn more about her life. Was it possible that she’d done the same thing with me?

“Why would you do that?”

“I can’t believe you haven’t figured it out yet,” she said. “It was so obvious to me from the moment that we met. You’re my sister.”

I laughed. She laughed too. Could laughter during uncomfortable moments be a genetic trait?

“No, I’m not. I’m an only child.”

There were many things that I was uncertain about in the world, but one thing that I knew for sure was that I’d been the single child in the house with my parents. No one had been with me when I heard those women scream.

“Come on. Put it together,” she said.

“Your father was murdered when you were a child.”

“Yes.”

“My father didn’t have any other children.”

I said it, though I wasn’t confident. My father was the kind of man who might’ve had numerous children and not cared about their existence. It was my mother who kept him tethered to me. Still, the math didn’t add up.

“My mother,” I said.

“My mother,” she echoed, those eyes of hers boring into my skull.

“No. I would’ve known.”

It wasn’t possible. My mother had never mentioned having another child.

When I was small, I’d begged and begged for a sibling, and my mother said that she refused to ruin her body like that again.

I tried to recall what Rebecca had said about her mother in our previous conversations, and I came up empty.

Our talks had always been about only her father.

He’d been murdered, so that made sense. Often the dead were discussed more than the living.

Her first husband, I realized. She had a baby with her first husband, and then my father killed him.

Before there was me, there was Rebecca. She’d had a normal family. Then, within weeks, it had all fallen apart.

“She left you,” I said.

Stupidly, there was some satisfaction in the statement. My mother had picked me. Well, she’d picked my father, and then I’d come along. As messed up as my childhood had been, at least my mother was around. She hadn’t left until I’d forced her to go. Surely that was an indication of a kind of love.

“For a while, she did,” Rebecca said. “But the mother-daughter bond is unbreakable.”

My head spun. I’d left the visit with my mother convinced that she’d been rendered impotent.

She was going to be in prison forever, slowly turning into a sad old woman who grasped at the smallest of things for joy.

How wrong I’d been. I was the daughter my mother talked to on Sundays.

It seemed possible that she had one for every day of the week.

“Did you always know about me?” I asked.

“I didn’t know about you until the arrest. You were a side comment, the child raised in a house of killers. My family never mentioned your name. I didn’t figure that out until years later. I hated you then, because I thought you were my replacement. Our mother left me behind, and then got you.”

“You were the lucky one. You didn’t see what she was really like. She abused me. She—”

“Shut up,” Rebecca said. Her voice sounded different.

Nicole had driven me crazy with her baby voice, but it hadn’t occurred to me that Rebecca might be similarly using an affect.

“You got to have her to yourself for years. I was by myself with a family who looked at me and only saw my dead father. How can you call that lucky? They wouldn’t let me talk to her.

They pretended she didn’t exist, but I never forgot.

I reached out to Mom as soon as I was old enough to afford my own cell phone.

We picked up again like we’d never been apart.

She made me whole, understood me in a way that no one else ever has.

Have you ever missed someone before you met them?

It was like that. Her absence hurt me daily. ”

I fixated on how casually she said “Mom,” like it was an easy word to push out of one’s mouth.

“How did you find me?” I asked.

“What’s that word you like? ‘Serendipity.’ That’s what it was.

You might find it interesting that Mom rarely talks about you.

It was years before she ever mentioned your name, and that wasn’t particularly helpful to me, since you’d changed your last name like a coward.

I found that picture online, of course, the one of you as a teenager, which also proved to be useless, though I was glad that all of Mom’s good looks were passed down to me.

I gave up the search. I told myself that if you didn’t want to see me, then I didn’t want to see you.

But you found me, Lexie. I was in the Twin Cities for a car show, and there, on my phone, was your face.

It was an ad for Better Love. So I got a job in the area and, well, the rest is history. ”

The ad. I hadn’t thought much about it. Serena was so good at stuff like that.

Most of running a business was less about what that business did and more about understanding how to sell it.

She used advertisements to hit targeted demographics.

She increased spending during holiday seasons, because that was when potential clients were at their loneliest. I wasn’t featured in most of the ads.

They didn’t even show my whole face. But my sister— my sister —had recognized me.

“Why didn’t you just tell me?” I asked.

“Initially my plan was to kill you.” Rebecca didn’t blink as she made the statement.

“You got to have her for all those years, while I was left behind. It wasn’t fair.

You had everything I didn’t—a mother, a father.

You never appreciated it, not how I would’ve.

Mom told me how you treat her. I told her to stop talking to you, and she wouldn’t listen.

I thought it best to take care of the issue for both of us.

But then I started following you, and I really liked you. ”