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

Chloe dips her eyes back towards her plate. Maureen must understand from this tiny gesture that she doesn’t want to talk anymore.

Maureen finishes off her food then puts down her cutlery and stands up. ‘I’d better get this kitchen cleared up,’ she says.

‘I’ll help—’

‘No, don’t you even think of it, Chloe. You go on into the living room with Patrick, make yourself comfy in front of the television. Knowing him, he’ll have one of those CSI things on the telly, but we’ll watch it together, the three of us. I only need a moment to clear up in here.’

TWENTY-THREE

Maureen is more than a moment, though. And Chloe sits stiffly on her hands on the sofa waiting for her. She’s aware of clinking pots and pans in the kitchen even if Patrick is oblivious.

‘Do you think I should go and help?’ she asks.

‘Hmm?’ Patrick wafts away her suggestion. ‘She’s used to it, you sit yourself down.’

There’s a detective series on the TV – just as Maureen had predicted. The fictional police chief is going over what they know so far about the case, what questions still need answering. Chloe imagines writing more of her own findings into her pale blue book later this evening: a description of the plates, the food, who sits where around the kitchen table, the way Patrick chews with his mouth open, the way Maureen fixes her hair – a nervous tic perhaps? How many detectives would want to be her right now? There have been moments, just odd split seconds, when she’s felt that flicker of guilt, when Maureen filled her in on some detail about their life that she knew already. She had to remind herself there is a higher purpose to her being here, perhaps something that Maureen and Patrick might thank her for one day.

Across the other side of the living room, Patrick is absorbed in the TV drama, his feet up on the pouffe, his fingers tapping on the remote control every so often, utterly unaware of Chloe watching him. She remembers that cutting then, the one from when he was arrested. It’s hard to imagine him now being bundled into a police car, kept in a dark, dank cell underneath the police station. She glances over her shoulder and wills Maureen to appear from the kitchen.

It’s ten minutes before Maureen comes in, carrying a tray of three mugs of tea and a small plate of biscuits.

‘Do you have to have the TV on that loud, Patrick?’ Maureen says. ‘I swear you need to get your hearing checked.’

‘Huh?’ he replies from his armchair.

Maureen looks at Chloe and rolls her eyes. She sits down beside her on the sofa. As she does, Chloe gets a whiff of her perfume, a sweet leafy scent.

‘Are you sure you’re full?’ Maureen asks. ‘You don’t want anything more to eat?’

Patrick looks over quickly from the chair. ‘You never bloody ask me that.’

‘Nothing wrong with your hearing when I’m talking about food,’ Maureen says, and the two women smile to each other.

It doesn’t feel to Chloe like they’re acting now. She imagines how they’d look to an outsider, dotted around the living room, lit by the lampshade hanging from the ceiling rose. Ordinary, that’s how they must look. Chloe swallows down tea and feels a warm glow inside.

‘That’s a nice photograph,’ she says, pointing over to the sideboard.

Maureen glances up slowly as she sips her tea and smiles. ‘Angie,’ she says.

Chloe’s heart is thumping. ‘Who’s Angie?’

Immediately, she looks down into the milkiness of her tea, asking herself whether she made her question sound natural enough. But she’s got to get them talking, isn’t that why she’s here?

‘That’s our little girl, isn’t it, Pat?’ Maureen says.

He looks up from the television at Maureen, and then at Angie. His face softens on cue.

‘What’s she up to now?’ Chloe asks, this time going for a breezy tone. She hates herself for having to do it this way.

Maureen’s eyes dip; she takes a moment to compose herself. When she looks up it’s with an expression that appears mastered for moments like this.

‘We don’t know, love,’ she says. ‘She disappeared, when she was just a little girl.’

Maureen gets up and takes the framed photograph down from the sideboard, holding it in both hands. She smiles at it, wipes away an invisible layer of dust, then walks back and passes it to Chloe on the sofa.

‘I’m so sorry,’ Chloe says, taking the picture. That’s not a lie. She holds the photograph in her hands and although she’s looked at it – studied it – many, many times before, even on her old bedroom wall, this time it’s different; the weight of the glass and frame in her hands, the specks of dust that cling to it, the volume turned up just that bit too loud on the TV, all of it adds to the picture, just like she knew it would.

‘She’s beautiful,’ Chloe says. ‘Do you have any more photographs?’

‘Of Angie?’

Chloe swallows a little, then nods.

‘Oh, hundreds.’

‘Can I see them?’ Chloe asks.

‘You want to?’

‘Of course.’

‘Yes,’ Maureen says. ‘Yes, they’re all here.’

Maureen keeps them in the same cupboard at the bottom of the sideboard where Nan keeps hers – like so many homes she’s been in do. Maureen carries the albums over to the sofa, places them down one on top of the other on the seat cushion between them. Chloe picks up a brown leather-bound one first, starts flicking through the pages, cellophane and static sticking them together. Maureen points out Angie’s baby photos as Chloe flicks slowly through: the ones of Angie lying naked on a sheepskin rug; sitting upright in the pram; holding up her cloth cat to the camera – the toy plumper then than the saggier version she’d come to know in the newspapers. Some of the photographs Chloe recognizes from the cuttings in the archive, not that she says anything. She can’t, not yet. Not until she has something more solid. She’s doing it for