The One

Dating Amy gives Christopher a chance to insert himself into the investigation of his own murders. Amy even playfully offers him the chance to name the “unknown” killer. As time goes on, however, Christopher spends more time with Amy and less time monitoring his future victims. When he contemplates killing Amy, he realizes that knowing he could kill her at any time is more satisfying than actually doing it.

Trying to understand himself better, Christopher researches the question of whether psychopathy precludes the ability to love another person. According to his research, it is possible for someone with psychopathy to form a stable attachment as long as the other party never lets them gain the upper hand in the relationship. Like Christopher, Amy has a strong compulsion to control. This makes her assertive enough that Christopher doesn’t feel the need to dominate her the way he does with other women. In addition, what little research has been done since the inception of Match Your DNA suggests that the genetic connection may be strong enough to induce attachment even in someone otherwise incapable of human connection.

It becomes more difficult for Christopher to keep his two worlds apart. As he is at one of his murder scenes cleaning up after number nine, he gets a phone call from Amy. Talking to her while standing over the body, he feels a thrill at the intersection of his two lives. The excitement of talking to Amy over the corpse of number nine inspires Christopher to go a step further. A few weeks later, he arranges for dinner with Amy and chooses the restaurant. His excitement mounts as they place their orders with the waitress. This is the first time Christopher has allowed his two lives to converge—Amy in the same room with and actually talking to victim number 13.

Jade reflects on what is going on between Kevin, herself, and Mark. She recalls hearing about a phenomenon called “transference” in which unwanted feelings about one person are redirected toward someone else. She must be afraid of falling in love with Kevin because they have so little time together, so her heart, or maybe her DNA, has latched onto Mark. She plans to avoid him, believing the disloyal feelings will disappear.

When she returns to the farm, Kevin proposes to her. He knows they have very little time left, and he would understand if she refused, but he loves her. Despite knowing that she doesn’t love him the way she wants to, Jade accepts his proposal. He is her best friend, and he has so little time. She wants him to feel as loved as he deserves.

Jade marries Kevin, and they have two weeks together. She takes care of him, keeps him company, and does everything in her power to make him happy. All the same, she never feels the attachment promised by Match Your DNA, and she increasingly desires Mark. After Kevin dies, Jade plans to leave the farm. She loves it, but she feels stifled and is hurt by Mark’s continued avoidance of her.

Jade is inspired by Kevin, who strove to embrace life in the face of death. She is no longer going to settle for a job she hates and a life that is going nowhere. Instead, she is going to make up for the backpacking trip she couldn’t afford to take with her friends after college, then she is going to go home and find a meaningful career. She plans to take Kevin’s old truck and drive down the Australian coast, meeting new people and seeing the world.

Nick and Alex are scheduled to fly to New Zealand when Nick receives a call from Sally. She’s pregnant. It happened on their vacation before they split up. Nick can’t understand why she didn’t tell him sooner, before he was committed to leaving with Alex. Sally fully reveals herself to be petty, selfish, and manipulative. She says that she can’t—or doesn’t want to—raise a child on her own. She tells Nick she’s going to have an abortion. He protests, but she tells him it’s not his choice since he left her for someone else. He reminds her that she was the one who broke it off, and she argues that she didn’t know she was pregnant at the time, as if this was somehow Nick’s fault. She gives him a choice: If he wants her to keep the child, he will have to stay with her.

Nick spends the night wrestling with love and duty. Everything in him wants to be with Alex, but Sally needs him, and he can’t bear the thought of losing his child. As dawn comes, he makes up his mind to put others’ needs ahead of his own. He will stay with Sally and the baby and try to make it work. He moves back into the apartment with Sally, sleeping in the spare room.

He still spends as much time as he can spare with Alex in the last few days before his Match goes back to New Zealand, but the inevitable day comes, and they are parted, expecting to never see each other again.

Her conversation with her head of personnel lingers in Ellie’s mind, but watching Tim interact with her family on Christmas day quiets her doubts. The next day, Tim gives Ellie a gift: a book of photographs of her, ending with a marriage proposal. Weeping with joy, Ellie accepts. She wants to keep their engagement a secret for as long as they can. The media will probably go into a frenzy when she announces that the CEO of Match Your DNA has found her own Match.

Ellie worries that while Tim wears his heart on his sleeve, she is more reserved, and it might make her seem cold. The book Tim made for her was an extremely touching gift. It occurs to her that she could do something similar to express her love to him. Intending to look through her iPad for photos, she finds that Tim must have recently used it to log into his own account in the cloud and forgotten to log off. Searching through his files for pictures she might use, she stumbles on a picture of his mother and recognizes her as Samantha Ward, a lab assistant back when Ellie first discovered the Match gene. The coincidence is too much to believe.

Ellie goes to Kat, the personnel director who thought she recognized Tim at the office Christmas party. Kat has already gone through her files, ensuring she made no mistake in remembering the interview with Matthew. She shows Ellie the file for Matthew Ward. There’s no photo, but the name alone is all the evidence Ellie needs. Tim lied to her from the start.