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

‘Yeah, thanks, Suleyman.’

He walks away and Chloe whispers to Hollie, ‘I can’t be bothered to explain.’ She nods. ‘How are you anyway?’

‘Oh, I’m fine. No news. More worried about you really, I couldn’t get hold of you . . .’

‘Yeah, like I said, I lost my charger, I’ll have to buy another one.’

Hollie looks back at her for a second. She can see Hollie’s unsure what to say next. She knows this look. But she knows Hollie well enough to know she’ll keep her confidence. That she knows there is no alternative.

‘Oh, that’s annoying,’ Hollie says, ‘they’re expensive as well. Especially when you haven’t got a job . . .’

Chloe quickly looks down at the menu.

‘I’m going to have the sausage, egg and chips,’ she says.

‘Do you think that’s wise?’

‘Why?’

‘Your bug.’

‘Oh yeah, you’re right.’ She turns her attention to the blander sides as Suleyman returns. ‘Just some toast for me,’ she says, handing back the menu.

‘Without butter?’ Hollie prompts. ‘It’s probably best.’

‘Oh, yeah . . . without butter.’

Hollie orders a coffee and poached eggs on toast.

‘How’s the job search going?’ she asks when Suleyman’s gone.

‘Not bad, yeah,’ Chloe says. ‘I might have an interview lined up through one of those recruitment agencies.’

‘Oh yeah? Which one did you go for in the end?’

‘Oh . . . I . . . I can’t remember, I spoke to so many . . .’

‘Phil says he never heard from you about that job.’

‘Yeah, I just didn’t . . . it didn’t seem my kind of thing.’

‘It was filing, Chloe,’ Hollie says.

Chloe starts fiddling with the pot of ketchup; it’s one of those giant tomato ones, the ones with the dark green lid that are always clogged with congealed tomato sauce. Chloe has always thought they were impractical.

She sees Hollie biting the corner of her lip, glancing between Chloe and the menu. She’s looking down, her finger tracing the list of food as she speaks.

‘And what about Nan? How is she doing?’ Hollie asks.

‘Oh yeah, good. I’ve been visiting her.’

‘Chloe, I . . .’

‘Well, I wasn’t going to just dump her in that care home and—’

‘No, of course not, that’s not what I’m saying. I just think, well, maybe it all happened for a reason. Maybe it’s for the best.’

‘Anyway, what was it you were calling about? Just a catch-up?’ Chloe says, trying to take the heat out of the conversation, to veer Hollie into different territory.

‘Sorry?’

‘You said you’d been calling me?’

Hollie reaches down to the handbag at her feet. She rifles around inside before pulling out a newspaper cutting. It’s folded a couple of times, but Chloe can tell from the typeset it’s her newspaper, or at least it was. She knows what’s coming: the job pages, Hollie’s highlighter pen.

‘I was flicking through the jobs section, you know, having a look for you really – Phil’s old job is being advertised, but anyway – and I saw this.’

Hollie unfolds the paper and lays out a spread on the table in front of her, ironing out the creases with her fist. The archivist in Chloe winces. She doesn’t recognize it at first, but then Hollie flips the page so it’s the right way up.

‘It’s that couple, the one who lost their daughter, and I just thought it was such a coincidence because you only mentioned her the other day to me, do you remember? You said you were working on the story and I guessed this was it, this update and . . .’

As Chloe stares at the newspaper the rest of the cafe with its chequered red and white tablecloths retreats into the background.

‘It was her, wasn’t it?’ Hollie asks, tilting her head to read the name upside down. ‘Angela Kyle?’

Chloe’s eyes dart across the spread, from headlines, to pull quotes, to the pixels of Maureen and Patrick Kyle until they finally collect in some recognizable fashion in her brain. She hadn’t known them at first, age and grief having taken their toll on their faces, weather and worry having beaten new lines into them, their hair greyer – and lesser in Patrick’s case. But these are the present-day colour versions of Maureen and Patrick. She reaches out just as Suleyman appears at the table with the food.

‘Here we go, ladies, one poached eggs on toast, and one plain toast no butter.’

He puts the small plate down right on top of the headline. Chloe picks it up quickly and, as she does, she takes it in for the first time:

WE’LL NEVER GIVE UP ON OUR ANGIE

Chloe gasps then – a kind of half-gasp, half-laugh. An exhalation of disbelief. Hollie looks up.

‘It is them, isn’t it?’ Hollie says.

‘Yes,’ Chloe replies. ‘Yes, it’s them.’

‘It says here they’ve moved,’ Hollie says between mouthfuls, ‘that’s what the piece is about. At first I picked it up thinking they’d found her or something, but it’s just a piece saying how they’ve moved to . . . oh, hang on.’ She leans forward then, over her eggs, rubbing one finger down the newsprint, blurring the ink as she reads upside down. Chloe winces as Hollie dabs her black-stained finger down, smudging the words. ‘There, there it is. Low Drove. That’s out in the Fens, isn’t it?’

Low Drove. Chloe has never heard of it.

Hollie chews on her toast, mentioning two more villages Chloe hasn’t heard of. ‘Yeah, it’s between them somewhere. Tiny place, I think me and Phil drove through it once when we were going to a garden centre. One road, blink and you miss it – that kind of place.’

Chloe is half listening, half reading. Scanning and reading and mouthing the words to herself until she’s not listening to Hollie anymore at all because this, this is all the proof she needed.

Chloe takes a bite of the toast but she can’t eat now, and not because of some fake stomach bug. It’s as if every hope she’d lost these last few days has been returned to her, as if wrapped up in this news cutting is a gift. But with the elation comes a horrid sickening feeling. She pictures all those torn and shattered cuttings, a feeling now that it was she who had let down Maureen and Patrick. It was she who