Page 8 of Matchmaking for Psychopaths

I was alone when I woke in the morning, my mouth so dry that it ached.

I wore only underwear, my sequined dress abandoned in a puddle on the floor.

Despite my near nudity, I was certain by the way that my body still hungered that the handsome man and I hadn’t slept together.

People should get awards for that kind of restraint.

I wasn’t embarrassed by my actions. People in rom-coms and reality television treated wild nights out as a kind of therapy.

The worse things were in their lives, the more they deserved recklessness.

They got drunk and kissed people. They got drunk and screamed at the sky.

They smashed plates and went on adventures late into the night.

Irresponsibility was a rite of passage in times of tragedy.

Though it would’ve been preferable if I hadn’t spilled my deepest, darkest secrets to a man whose name I couldn’t remember.

What surprised me was how ineffective my wild night had been.

I’d hoped that the experience would be a kind of cleansing, after which I would wake with a new kind of clarity, and instead, my head was pounding and there were several bruises on my legs—probably due to my attempts at dancing.

Worst of all was my heart, which ached so badly that I examined my breasts, looking for signs of trauma.

I wanted to text Molly and tell her what had happened.

Outside of the handsome man, she was the only person in my life who knew the truth about my childhood, or at least the amount that was safe for me to tell.

I wanted to cuddle up next to Noah, have him stroke my hair and tell me to drink some electrolytes to cure my hangover.

I couldn’t do either of those things, because the two people I’d loved and trusted most in the world had betrayed me in order to be with each other.

I’d never been heartbroken before, at least not by a man.

Prior to Noah, I’d avoided serious relationships.

It was safer to keep my distance. But I wanted what I saw in movies.

The doting husband. Cute kids who performed in school plays.

The mother-in-law who said things like You can call me Mom .

That was one of the things I hadn’t previously understood about breakups, that in addition to losing the person, you were also losing the entire universe they existed in.

It had been only twelve hours, and already Noah’s absence hurt so badly that I longed to crawl out of my skin.

Infuriatingly, unlike for an external injury, there was no Band-Aid that I could apply, no healing ointment.

All those scientific advances, and still there was no cast for a broken heart.

My own body was out of my control, and the only way I could conceive of to fix it, regardless of whatever forgiveness and humiliation it might entail, was getting Noah back.

I found my purse on the floor, my phone inside of it. A small relief. On the dresser there was a key card with the name of the hotel, and I called the front desk.

“Can you tell me the credit card on file for this room?” I asked.

The receptionist rattled off an unfamiliar train of digits.

“Thank you. And what’s the checkout time? Late checkout? Great. Can you transfer me to room service?”

I ordered a full breakfast and enough coffee for two. I took a shower while I waited for the food to arrive, and dressed myself in one of the robes hanging in the bathroom.

I ate in bed, not caring whether I got crumbs on the sheets, and looked through my phone to see if there was any evidence of what had happened the previous night.

There were a couple of “happy birthday” texts, including one from Noah’s mother.

I took that as a sign that he hadn’t told her what he was planning on doing.

Thank you! I replied. I wasn’t going to be the one to tell her. Noah was going to have to do that himself.

Noah’s mother and I were close. That’s what I told people.

We’re close, I said smugly. A man was the goal, yes, but his family was equally important.

There was a whole genre of movies about that.

The son bringing the daughter home for the holidays.

The awkward interactions, followed by eventual welcoming.

When he first brought me home after six months of dating, I’d prepared myself for the familial hazing that the screen had warned me of.

It never came. Noah’s mother screamed when she saw me.

“You’re so cute!” she said.

“I can’t wait for grandchildren!” came out of her mouth only ten minutes later.

I soon figured out that I’d confused my genres.

She wasn’t a mother from Meet the Parents or The Family Stone .

She was from a Hallmark movie. All she’d ever aspired to was having babies and learning how to make the perfect casserole, and now that she’d completed all that, she was ready to pamper some grandchildren.

I was fascinated by her outfits, which looked like they were from a J.Crew catalog spread.

The way that she seemed never to swear or raise her voice, even though she had four children.

How she always left at least half her meal on her plate, claiming that she was “so full” despite having spent hours in the kitchen.

She was the opposite of my own mother, who wore salacious outfits that showed off her breasts, never cooked, and didn’t hesitate to take the last bite of food off a shared appetizer plate.

It wasn’t that I wanted Noah’s mother to replace my own.

No, actually, that was exactly what I wanted.

I wanted her to adopt me as a daughter. I did everything I could to be like a woman raised in her home.

I learned how to cook. I bought a series of conservative sweaters, which Noah found oddly sexual.

What really made us click was the one thing that she and my mother had in common—she too liked romantic comedies.

She disliked the violence on the news, she said.

She enjoyed feel-good stories in which two people met each other and fell in love.

We watched those movies, the ones I’d originally viewed with my mother, and it was almost the same.

The bowl of popcorn was smaller, her laughter quieter.

Sometimes she cried, which was something that my mother never did.

I struggled to pay attention to the films. I spent the whole time thinking Is this it?

Have I escaped from all the trauma that my mother wrought?

It pained me to think of Noah telling her that he’d left me for Molly.

A small, irrational part of me hoped that she would choose me over her son.

After all, he was the one who’d cheated on me.

I was innocent. I’d been faithful. I’d been the person everyone wanted me to be, someone who was deserving of love.

Maybe she would convince him to get back together with me.

That was the kind of thing a mom in a movie might do.

I looked at Molly’s social media. She’d posted a picture of herself in her sparkling dress, the one that was identical to mine.

Celebrating!!! said the caption. Because I was looking for it, I found ugliness in the shot.

Strands of hair slightly out of place. Wrinkles beginning to form around her eyes, her smile.

I wondered what she and Noah were doing, and then I made myself stop. It was best not to think about it.

Before leaving the hotel, I selected one of the selfies I’d taken the previous night.

They’d taken on new significance in the hours that had passed.

The person in the pictures was young and innocent—she had the face of someone who had never heard her best friend say that she’d stolen her fiancé.

I selected one, quickly edited it, and posted it on social media.

Thanks for all the birthday wishes! I captioned it. I had the best time!!!

There was no reason that anyone needed to know about Noah and Molly.

One kind of pain was caused by what they had done to me.

A second would be because of other people knowing about it, and I wanted to avoid that for as long as possible.

My embarrassment over the situation was almost as sharp as the heartbreak.

At least that had a relatively easy remedy—I simply needed to get Noah back before too many people knew.

I thought briefly of the handsome man, wondered where he’d disappeared to. It didn’t matter. He’d served his purpose. It had been nice having a good-looking guy interested in me for the night, but now I needed to resume the path to my destiny.

Back at the town house, I set about cleaning.

I put fresh sheets on the bed, helpfully popped Noah’s dirty clothes into the washing machine for when he came back, and mopped the kitchen floor.

Remnants of the hangover lingered in my body, but as long as I kept moving, I was able to keep the worst waves of heartbreak at bay.

Cleaning wasn’t intuitive for me. My parents had never done it. Mess piled up around us until we moved and left everything behind. I still remembered the dolly that was forgotten when I was four.

“I’ll buy you a new one,” my mother said flippantly, and she bought me an expensive replacement that I hated.

As a result, I was weirdly protective of my belongings, unable to break the paranoia that someone might take them from me.

Other people cleaned before their parents came over for visits, but I cleaned so that my house never looked like theirs.

I knew how neglect could wear at things until they broke, and thus, by reading books and watching videos of women who looked like Noah’s mother, I taught myself to care for my home.

I still hated it. The hate was part of the point.

It was the reason why I did the bulk of the tasks on Sunday, the day that I talked to my mother each week.

I needed one type of unpleasantness to distract me from another.