Chapter 18 #2
Chuckling lightly, I nodded and waited until I managed to swallow. “He told me dating me felt like dating a spreadsheet.” Laughing about trauma was healthy, right?
Grant stopped, looking at me with a deep, confused frown. “What does that even mean?”
I shrugged, ignoring the way my body shook with vulnerability, like I was in shock or something. “That I’m too analytical. Too rigid. Too sterile. Too uptight, like Leo said.”
His frown didn’t leave. If anything, he just looked more skeptical. “And instead of realizing he was the problem, you restructured your entire emotional operating system?”
I opened my mouth to respond, but nothing came out. I’d just told Grant what was wrong with me—things I thought about all the time but never voiced aloud—and it hadn’t fazed him.
I kept walking. “You don’t know he was the problem. You don’t know Chase.”
“I don’t have to. I know you. That’s enough.”
My chest pinched, but I kept walking, forcing my mind to focus on the cars we were passing. But scanning every maroon car in the vicinity didn’t require enough brain power to prevent my thoughts.
Grant was saying the words I wanted to believe—things that might undo years of emotional self-flagellation if I really internalized them. But it was easy for an outsider like him to say; I’d lived it. I knew the data, and they didn’t support what he was saying.
I stopped walking and turned toward him. “Do you know what the statistics say about women like me, Grant?”
He watched me but said nothing, his eyes sharp with focus.
“Women in heavy-hitter roles—CEOs, executives—we’re two times as likely to get divorced in the first year, and that’s with a divorce rate of 42% for the general public.
Or how about the fact that men’s stress levels skyrocket and their mental health declines when their wives make more money than them?
How much chemistry do you think that generates in a relationship? ”
My chest heaved like I’d just shot-put a hundred pounds of the questions that kept me up at night right at his face.
But Grant just looked at me, quiet, as the seconds passed. He didn’t flinch. He didn’t cringe.
“It was my ex too.”
I blinked.
“The person who made me afraid of believing a lie again.”
Chase and all those angry statistics fled my brain like birds after a gunshot. I stayed still, like blinking or breathing might stop Grant from telling me more. I couldn’t let him get away with a short answer this time.
“When she broke up with me,” he said, holding my gaze, “she told me she’d fallen out of love with me months before.” His jaw shifted. “Looking back, there’d been signs, of course, but I’d ignored them. I’d believed what I’d wanted to believe.”
There was a tinge of hurt in his eyes, but when he blinked, it was gone.
“So,” he said, turning and continuing our walk, “we both got traumatized by past relationships. I made it my mission to uncover truth, and you…” He glanced over at me. “You started a matchmaking company when you don’t even believe in love.”
“I do believe in love,” I argued. “I’m just…afraid of it.” I rushed on before the vulnerability hangover could hit. “I started Matchify because I believe in data. Data don’t lie.”
We walked the sloped drive down to the eighth floor.
Grant shook his head. “Data—singular noun, by the way—does lie. It lies all the time. You know why? Because people manipulate it. And it’s all the more sinister when they do because they still claim it’s objective.”
He wasn’t wrong. But he wasn’t right either.
Data weren’t inherently meaningful. We interpreted them and derived meaning from them. But that didn’t mean they weren’t worth pursuing. Good, complete data? They were valuable. They held kernels of truth that were difficult—impossible, even—to find through other methods.
“So, what, then?” I said. “You just throw it all out? You may mistrust data—and not without reason—but I find the argument a little ironic coming from you.”
“Why?”
“You claim you can’t trust data, then you provide unreliable data on your Matchify profile?”
I hadn’t meant to make this about the 12% thing, but here we were. It had risen to the surface like a fish at the first ripple of fish food.
He cocked a brow. “This accusation coming from you? Pot meet kettle.” He put out his hand for me to shake.
I ignored it. “What?”
“Succulents?” he offered.
“I told you—I don’t like flowers.”
“And I still don’t believe you. But unlike you, I didn’t provide unreliable data.”
I let out a disbelieving sigh.
“I did at first,” he granted. “But I went back and filled it out for real a few days later.”
My smile vanished. “You did?”
“Yeah.”
I searched his face for the lie, but there was none. He was too nonchalant about it to be lying.
I shut my eyes for a second as the ramifications began to line up like dominoes.
Grant had filled out his profile with real, genuine answers.
Which meant that the 12% wasn’t based on faulty data.
Which meant that Grant Wilder and I had the worst compatibility I’d ever seen on Matchify.