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

Not that she says as much. But it’s Maureen’s response to her recognition that she notices, as if a tiny circuit board has been lit inside her. Chloe knows she could tell her why she recognizes these toys, that she should tell her. But she can’t. Instead she watches as Maureen sobs into the soft cat, calling her missing daughter’s name over and over again.

THIRTY

Maureen insists that everything in the room has to be put away before Patrick comes home. The tea sits abandoned downstairs, while the two women work together in the room that has been barred to Chloe these last three weeks of living here.

Maureen packs things hurriedly, but Chloe works more slowly, each toy sparking off a different memory, from newspaper cuttings or her own childhood – she and Angie were the same age, after all, and so, quite naturally, everything blurs into one. She picks up a Ladybird book – Hansel and Gretel – and flicks through its pages. She had the exact same one.

Beside her, Maureen searches for the box the cloth cat had been in. Chloe watches her push it back down among the other soft toys – a koala bear with real fur, a polar bear with black eyes and a sewn-on nose.

‘Will you always keep these things?’ Chloe asks.

Maureen pauses, bent over a box.

‘I mean, if Patrick doesn’t like you coming in here . . .’ Chloe adds.

Maureen sinks down on a sealed box. She sighs and looks around at this museum of her missing daughter.

‘In the old house we kept everything just the way it was,’ Maureen says. ‘We never changed a thing, even the sheets on her bed, like I told you. I had to keep everything the same, just in case.’

Chloe nods, remembering the gate at the old house and its peeling paint. She had probably brought the flakes of it in her coat pocket to Elm House. It was this same loyalty Chloe had come to admire in these two shattered parents.

‘When we moved here, we had to take everything down,’ Maureen continues. ‘Patrick said it needed to be a new start in every sense. He knows I want to make her bedroom up again but he doesn’t . . . well, he doesn’t think it’s good for me to live in the past. That’s why he put that padlock on the door. I’ve got the key but he hopes it’ll make me stop before I come in here, to think about him and his pain. That’s why I sneak in at night while he’s asleep. Sometimes just being among her things . . . it makes me feel closer to her, you know?’

Chloe nods, she knows a grave is not a marker for the one you love, not when they have already scored their name inside the skin and bones of you. How could Patrick deny his wife her grief? It’s not like she’s hurting anyone. It seems cruel, harsh, just because she grieves differently to him. But then, how does he grieve? Apart from the photographs in the newspapers, what grief has he ever shown Chloe inside Elm House?

‘I’ve done these pieces in the newspaper every year,’ Maureen says. ‘Interviews, you know, because I wanted the world to keep talking about Angie. I don’t want anyone to forget that she could be out there, that there’s still a chance . . . so when would it be the right time to let go of all this? Surely if I did let go, I would be admitting that she’s never coming back, and I’ll never do that as long as I live. Never. That’s what Patrick doesn’t understand.’

Maureen’s eyes fill with tears, the pain so obviously always sitting just beneath her skin.

‘You know you can talk to me, Maureen – if you want to, I mean,’ Chloe says. ‘We can talk about Angie if Patrick won’t.’

Maureen’s face softens and Chloe feels sure that being granted permission to grieve so openly has ironed out some of the lines that the same pain created.

‘Thank you, Chloe.’

Maureen reaches for a tendril of Chloe’s hair, twisting it between finger and thumb. Chloe stands perfectly still.

‘Angie’s hair was so much like yours,’ Maureen says. ‘Almost jet black, just the same . . . I’m sure of it.’ She whispers that last bit.

Chloe is silent, she dare not even exhale, as if this moment itself is made of fragile glass and even her breath might shatter it.

‘I’m so afraid of forgetting the exact colour of her hair,’ Maureen says. ‘Forgetting anything would be a betrayal of my daughter. There have been times since you’ve arrived when I’ve just caught a glimpse of you, going out into the hall, or walking up the lane in the morning. Sometimes I’ve stood at the window at the top of these stairs and watched you. Does that sound ridiculous?’

Chloe shakes her head gently and her hair falls out of Maureen’s grasp.

‘But I’ve allowed myself to imagine, just for a moment, that you, with your dark hair, walking off up the lane towards the bus stop, are her . . . that you are Angie. I’ve let myself pretend that she’s still here and she lives with us and it’s her, not you, going to work every morning. You must think I’m mad.’ Maureen closes her eyes and smiles. ‘I know Patrick does. I made the mistake of telling him that once, I even said . . .’ She pauses, and dips her gaze towards the floor. ‘I even said . . .’

Chloe holds her breath. What?

A loud rapping on the front door shakes Maureen out of the moment. Her eyes dart around the room.

‘Oh God, what if that’s Patrick?’ Maureen says.

‘But why would he be knock—’

‘Quick, get the last of this stuff away.’

Another rattle at the door.

‘Quick.’

The two women hurry as they put the last of the toys back in the boxes. They throw them in, without the care they’d taken until now, pushing the cardboard sides down.

‘Quickly,’ Maureen says, panic staining her voice.

They step outside the room and Maureen shuts the door behind them, her hands shaking as she clicks the padlock back