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

meantime, you and I just need to complete the relevant paperwork here at the station. Now, if you don’t mind, her social worker’s details . . .’

Chloe wakes with a start, shaking off the rest of a dream she’s had a thousand times before. Anxiety is somehow always waiting for her in the night; it’s constantly there, just under her skin. She opens her eyes quickly as she remembers Nan. She quickly leans over and finds her mobile on the floor beside her bed, but the screen is blank. It is still only 5 a.m. She lies back down on her pillow, but when she closes her eyes the same faces are there. She feels helpless. She gets out of bed, gathers her clothes up from the floor and dresses quickly. But at the bottom of the stairs she looks out the window, onto a dawn that has yet to fully rise, and wonders what she is supposed to do. Nan is still out there. There has been no news overnight. Or at least she has heard nothing. Should she stay here and wait for her? It feels as if she should be doing something else, something more practical. But what? The police insisted they would do everything they could.

She pulls the thick curtain back from the door, wondering why she’d even bothered to draw it across last night when Nan was still out there. She opens the front door and feels the cold rush in. She shivers at the thought of Nan wandering the streets.

By the time she leaves, the sun is dyeing the night sky orange. She pulls the front door shut behind her and looks up at Nan’s little semi, darkness behind each window. The adjacent houses still sleep, families that haven’t long moved into the area tucked safely behind each of them. The neighbours’ front door is right next to her own; their path is decorated with glazed terracotta pots and in one a rainbow windmill smiles out at the morning. It belongs to the little girl who sleeps in the room above the front door. She’s five or six, and she always stops to say hello. Chloe couldn’t describe what she looked like – her eyes are always trained on the little girl’s hands, one always locked tight inside her mother’s.

A small wind blows and the plastic sails spin happily. Chloe tightens the belt on her coat and heads up the path towards the road.

In the lift up to the office Chloe studies her reflection in the mirror. The cold morning still clings to her cheeks and there’s little she can come up with to comfort herself that Nan is safe and warm somewhere. She plucks a stray leaf still tangled in strands of her dark hair; she must have collected it in the copse yesterday. She goes back over the scene, asking again how Nan could have just disappeared. It doesn’t feel right to come to work on a day like today. But what else is she going to do? Perhaps the right thing is to stay busy. She imagines that’s the advice they’d give in films. The lift announces the third floor, and she steps out towards the newsroom, leaving more foliage from under her footstep.

It’s still early and the beep of her security pass announces her arrival. The editor, Malc, stands by the news desk, hands in his pocket, swivelling on his heels between the news editor and the assistant editor as they decide on that day’s splash. He doesn’t look up as she makes her way towards the archive. No one ever does.

Chloe reaches her desk and checks her phone again for missed calls, just like she had when she got into the lift three minutes earlier. There’s nothing, no news. She places it on her desk beside her keyboard.

She’s not due in to work for another hour and a half, but she knows she needs to keep busy to distract herself from checking her mobile phone. She’s always preferred the archive without people. Her eyes fall to a plastic orange crate beside Alec’s desk – a job they’ve both been avoiding. The crate contains some of the oldest files that need scanning ready for the new electronic system. She turns the scanner on and watches as the bright white light beams back from beneath the flatbed.

She works on automatic; she knows how things operate here. Each file is a small brown gusset envelope, just slightly bigger than a postcard. Most have a few dozen cuttings folded neatly inside, the girth of the envelope a giveaway to the stories that have dominated the headlines over the decades. Some have even multiplied, giving birth to one or even two more envelopes. In those cases the files will be marked cont. and numbered. But the first one she picks up, although thick, has only one line on the front: KYLE; ANGELA. It’s written as all the others are: neat capitals in black marker, double underlined in the top right-hand corner. Just the way Alec likes it. She has always appreciated the archive for that, the safety within the order of everything. How she needs that today.

Chloe turns the file over in her hands, noticing how some of the seams have started to give way. She pulls its insides out as carefully as a surgeon, the envelope collapsing without them. Dozens of cuttings scatter across the light grey melamine of her desk, fanning out like a neutral paint chart, instantly revealing the length of time this particular story has dominated the headlines. The older cuttings are various shades of pale yellow and ivory – daffodil white, perhaps; the newer ones are magnolia.

Chloe picks a cutting at random. It’s an old one, she can tell from the folds that have been impressed over and over by the hammy thumbs of reporters. She takes extra care not to tear the fine newsprint as she peels it open, stirring it again with oxygen. The cutting resists as she stretches it