The Imposter, Anna Wharton [romantic story to read TXT] 📗

step away from the door and then back again. It can’t be right. She goes to knock again, then decides against it. She steps back, checks the number – definitely 48. She heads back down the path slowly, through the flaking blue gate. She’s in such a hurry to leave, she forgets to close it after her. She takes another look back at the house and sees the woman watching her from the window. It can’t be right, something must be wrong. Patrick and Maureen wouldn’t have moved. They couldn’t have.

She walks home slowly, her shoes dragging on the pavement. She tries desperately to think of explanations. She passes a bin and dumps the notepad and pen into it. What if it had been Angie knocking on that door? What then? She can feel the ugliness rearing inside. And something else: anger, hurt. Hot black stones that burn inside her belly. After all these years of saying they’d wait for Angie how could they have just upped and left?

By the time she gets back to Nan’s she’s stumbling to get her key in the lock. When she does the hallway is blurred with angry tears. She slams it behind her, catching a bit of Nan’s curtain in it. She pulls it out, too hard, the top of it coming free from the rings, and it hangs there, limp, useless.

‘How could they just leave?’ she cries to an empty hallway. And then again louder, ‘How could they just leave?’

She runs up to her room, half expecting to open her door and the cuttings to be gone too, as if she had imagined the hurt and pain in Maureen and Patrick’s eyes. But the cuttings are there, waiting for her, mocking even. She scans them quickly, her finger tracing the lines, one after another, after another, until she finds what she’s looking for:

‘Angela is our life, our love, our everything. An open wound will be here in our hearts until the day she is returned to us. We will wait for the rest of our lives for the day we are reunited.’

Liars.

Her hand grips the top of the paper, she pulls and the whole page comes loose from the Blu-Tack. It hangs there, limply. She thinks of the curtain downstairs. She thinks of Nan in the home. She thinks of Claire Sanders taking Nan away. Now taking her house too. She thinks of Malc sacking her from the archive. She thinks of Maureen and Patrick – why had she ever trusted them? She pulls harder, the cuttings rip. She pulls the next and the next. It feels better. She uses both hands then, ripping at the cuttings with her fingers, feeling stronger with every tear. She goes faster and faster. She sees Maureen and Patrick’s faces tear in two, words split on the wall, on the floor. Fake words, lies. She stamps on them.

What’s the use in keeping them anyway?

She pulls again and tears and rips and all those fake words gather in a pile on the floor. She pulls again and again, snatches and slashes until the wall is bare and the woodchip shows through. Until just a few dots of pale blue putty or their greasy marks remain on the paper, and those smoky shadowy outlines of the pictures that once hung there. In places even the lining paper is torn. Not that Chloe cares. At her feet are the scattered remains of the cuttings, the stories, the headlines, the pictures, the quotes. All lies.

Then, among the rubble, the panic comes. She searches quickly from one article to another, to another, desperately trying to find one of the earliest. She picks it up with two hands, scans through the lines for the address. What if it was her fault? What if she had got the house number wrong? But there it is, unchangeable. 48. The same house she went to. Nothing had changed in black and white, yet in real life, everything had.

She sinks down among the paper on the floor, kicking one cutting off her shoe, and feels her throat constrict with hot tears.

Maureen and Patrick were meant to be different from all the rest. What a fool she’s been. They are exactly the same.

SEVENTEEN

It’s the afternoon before Chloe finally pulls herself up from the floor of her own shattered archive. She only does because she’d promised to visit Nan. Not that Nan will remember. But the staff will. She walks out of her bedroom with cuttings stuck to the soles of her shoes. One trails out of the house after her. She peels it off her shoe and allows the wind carry it off up the street.

It’s just after 3.30 p.m. when she boards the bus. She changes twice and watches children in various school uniforms walking home, skipping alongside Mum or Dad. She plays a game from her seat by the window, trying to spot the parents who would move away from their kids should they disappear. She doesn’t find a single one.

Chloe arrives at Park House just after the residents have had afternoon tea.

‘There’s a few muffins left in a dish in the communal room if you’re peckish,’ one of the care assistants tells her.

She shakes her head. She has lost her appetite.

‘Your grandma has been really looking forward to seeing you.’

They both know she’s lying.

Chloe walks past the communal room on her way to find Nan. From the circular walkway she sees the backs of half a dozen white heads waiting patiently for their own visitors. She feels something akin to one jigsaw piece fitting into another inside her. At least here she is needed and she feels a tiny flame reignite. She longs to be needed by somebody, and for a while she had forgotten that that person is Nan.

Nan is lying on her bed when Chloe arrives at her room.

‘Oh nurse, thank goodness you’re here.’

‘It’s me, Nan,’ she says, approaching the bed. ‘It’s Chloe.’

Her brow crinkles. ‘I don’t know a Chloe.’

Not