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

had lost faith in them. The toast rolls around and around in her mouth. Finally she swallows.

She picks the paper up and reads the headline again.

WE’LL NEVER GIVE UP ON OUR ANGIE

‘Come on, eat that toast, it’ll do you good. Actually,’ Hollie says, ‘you’re looking better already, bit more colour in your cheeks. It must be the fresh air.’

Chloe looks back at her friend, tearing her attention away from the newspaper cutting for a split second.

‘Can I . . . can I keep this?’

‘Yeah, course.’ Hollie fills her fork with another mouthful. ‘Keep it, Phil will only screw it up and use it for kindling in our wood burner. Did I tell you we had a wood burner installed? You should feel the heat it kicks out, we didn’t even have the heating on the other night and . . .’

But Chloe is busy reading:

A HEARTBROKEN couple have finally moved from their city home twenty-five years after their daughter went missing, but the pair insist they have not given up hope of her return.

Four-year-old Angela Kyle disappeared from Ferry Meadows after her father Patrick took her to play at a park there in October 1979. Mr Kyle and his wife, Maureen, have appealed for information on their missing daughter, but despite an extensive police inquiry there have been no new leads. For the last twenty-five years they have stayed in the same house, even keeping her bedroom as a shrine to little Angie, should she return. But last week they swapped their Dogsthorpe home for a Fen village.

‘It doesn’t mean we have given up hope of Angie being found,’ said Maureen Kyle from their new home in Low Drove. ‘I’m still as sure today as I was twenty-five years ago that Angie will come home one day, but it’s been hard staying in the same place, surrounded by all those memories, every fresh lead and every fresh disappointment. We needed a new start.’

Chloe looks up at Hollie. She can’t tell her what she’s thinking, that it feels to her as if Maureen is reaching out of the newspaper to reassure every doubt she’s had over the last few days. When she pictures those cuttings pulled from the wall and kicked under her bed, her temples throb and the cafe feels small and stuffy. She leans back and takes deep breaths, her forehead tingling with sweat.

Hollie looks up at her, her knife and fork wavering mid-air.

‘Oh, you’re not right, Chloe,’ she says. ‘Look, you’ve gone all pale again, and you haven’t touched your toast.’ She wipes the last of her own toast around her plate quickly. ‘Come on, let’s get you home.’

Chloe says goodbye to Hollie on the doorstep. She had to shuffle from one foot to the other, as if she needed the loo, until Hollie got the message.

As soon as she closes the door she runs up to her bedroom. There, on her hands and knees, she pulls out all the photocopies she’d pushed under her bed, releasing them from the tight angry balls she’d screwed them into.

She curses herself as she goes, curses herself for doubting Maureen and Patrick. Two parents who had proved time and again, year after year, how devoted they were to their little girl. She should have known them better. She knows, deep down, the past is always there, just under her skin. Life filtered through a lens of distrust is the best way of avoiding disappointment. But Maureen and Patrick are the first people who have ever proved her wrong. And surely that’s got to mean something.

NINETEEN

Out in the Fens the roads are long and straight. There’s often a camber each side which slopes into a grassy bank and then further still into a dyke, one side or the other, occasionally both. Through the windscreen of the bus, it looks as if the road is a giant grey play mat rolled out for a child to run toy cars up and down. The lumps and bumps in the road make Chloe’s stomach pitch up and down. Or perhaps that’s just nerves.

It’s been a while since the bus left Peterborough, crossing over one anonymous roundabout after another until the buildings faded away into flat countryside. From the A47 Chloe had spotted the lonely little Eel Catcher’s Cottage abandoned in the middle of a field, its thatched roof still withstanding the elements. On school trips to the coast, kids had made up stories about a wicked old woman who lived there and ate children for her supper.

The sky is bigger here. The grey clouds hang low, appearing, in the distance, to touch the tops of the trees that provide a windbreak for the crops – the only thing that breaks the Fenland for miles. The bus slows and stops to let people off as it passes through one village after another – Parsons Drove, Murrow – each little more than a string of bungalows with long neat gardens, interrupted only by the occasional empty petrol forecourt.

Chloe shuffles to the edge of her seat as a cluster of houses appears. She wonders each time if this village sign will read Low Drove, yet time and again she is disappointed – or perhaps a little relieved.

When she moves she feels the news cutting Hollie gave her crinkle inside her coat pocket. She’s brought it with her to make sure she’s got the right place. There it is again, that churning inside. Is today really the day she’s going to see Maureen and Patrick? Because that’s all she wants to do, just look. She’d already decided that before she left home. That’s why she didn’t take the same care when dressing. All she’s going to do is find the house, see where they live and perhaps – if she’s lucky – catch a shadow at the window, or a glimpse of them pottering in their garden.

Time passes looking out the windows. The sky has darkened and black clouds hang heavy, threatening to burst. Her hand reaches for the cutting in her pocket and