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

her spine. It is the same picture she has passed by a thousand times, and yet how could she not have noticed this one thing? She picks it up. In it, Angie is standing in her back garden, long grass licking the back of her knees; she’s laughing into the camera, her hair pulled into two bunches, and she’s holding the same baby doll – Chloe now recognizes – from the spare room that very afternoon. But it’s what Angie’s wearing that takes the breath from her. Chloe looks down at the material on her own blouse – at every mustard sunflower – and then back at the picture. Exactly the same. She feels for her collar, to the starch white shape of it. She is wearing an exact replica. Even the buttons are identical.

She drops the photograph and it clatters against the windowsill.

‘Chloe, love?’ Maureen calls. ‘Everything all right? Dinner’s on the table.’

With shaking hands, Chloe stands the photograph upright again. She hears Maureen’s footsteps heading down the hall.

‘Chloe? Is everything OK?’

‘Fine,’ Chloe calls back, ‘just coming.’

Maureen’s footsteps disappear back into the kitchen.

In her room she looks down at her top. She moves in front of the mirror, and stares at her reflection. It is the same. The exact same. She takes her hands and makes two bunches from her almost black hair. She holds them at the side of her head and they hang loosely from her palms.

‘Exactly the same,’ she whispers. Under the blouse, her heart is racing.

Chloe drops her hair and it returns to her shoulders. She pulls the top over her head and throws it onto her bed, exchanging it for the same jumper she has had on all day. Then, slowly, she descends the stairs for dinner.

It’s quiet around the table. Patrick wipes bread around his plate and tells Maureen some story about his sick friend at the seed factory. Maureen asks more questions about the type of cancer he has and they count on their fingers how many friends they’ve known who’ve had the same.

Chloe eats slowly, like she always does, but this time the food on her fork gets tinier as she prepares every bite.

‘You do like it, don’t you, Chloe?’ Maureen asks.

She nods, perhaps too enthusiastically, and Maureen’s attention falls back to her own dinner.

She eats slowly, watching them. Had she imagined now that flicker of disappointment on Maureen’s face when she came down for dinner wearing her jumper rather than her new blouse? Had she even remembered she’d asked Chloe to wear it tonight? She is waiting for Maureen to ask her about it, but the truth is, Chloe hasn’t prepared an answer. Something like betrayal is beating in her blood, though she doesn’t know why.

‘And what did you do today, Chloe?’ Patrick asks. ‘Did you see any of your friends?’

Chloe looks to Maureen, who purses her lips as she chews, as if to remind her not to say anything about the spare room.

‘I . . . er, no, just a quiet day, you know, tired from work.’

‘And what is it you do again?’ he says. He’s finished his meal, his knife and fork in a neat line on his plate, but he makes no move to leave the table. In fact, he pushes his chair back towards the wall and crosses his legs, trailing his hands in his lap.

Chloe looks to Maureen again, but this time she seems more relaxed, her expression encouraging this sudden interest in her.

‘Insurance,’ Chloe says. Isn’t that what she told them when she arrived? She’s panicking now, she can feel it in every pore of her skin. Her hands are clammy. She pushes them under the table.

‘Oh aye, which firm?’

Chloe tells him, quickly remembering the name of Phil’s company.

‘Oh, I have a mate who works there,’ he says. ‘Know him from school. John Bennett? Do you know him?’

Chloe shakes her head. Beneath the table, she presses her thumbnail into her palm. She’s disappointed when she doesn’t feel pain.

‘No,’ she says, looking up to the ceiling. ‘I don’t.’

Patrick waits a moment, then gets up from the table. He puts his plate in the sink. Chloe flinches a little when the knife and fork clatter to the bottom of it. What is it about his sudden interest in her that is making her so nervous?

‘I’m surprised you haven’t heard of him,’ Patrick says, ‘’cos as far as I’m aware, he’s still the managing director.’

Maureen looks up from her plate. Patrick stands behind her chair. Chloe twists her fingers together underneath the table, pinching the skin until it hurts. The kitchen burns with silence. There’s a beat. Another.

‘Oh, that John, yes, of course I know him . . . well, I don’t know him because I’m just, you know, in admin, but yes . . .’ she nods.

Too fast?

She turns to look up to Patrick, nodding. ‘Yes, I know John, of course, by reputation.’ It’s a thin line between making it seem convincing and overacting.

Patrick picks up his newspaper and walks out of the kitchen. Chloe turns back to Maureen and, as she does, she’s sure she sees her shoulders relax.

THIRTY-TWO

Chloe sits beside Nan in the communal room at Park House. Between them are two cups of tea. Chloe’s is empty and steam has long since finished curling out of Nan’s. Chloe had reminded her several times that it was there, but it sits in the mug, the milk separating from the tea on the surface. An island breaks off and drifts away.

‘Miserable day out,’ Nan says.

She’s said this at least a dozen times.

Chloe reaches over for her hand and squeezes it. She’s all out of replies. She looks around the room, where each floral-patterned chair is filled with a grey-haired resident.

‘All old folk here,’ Nan mutters, cocking her head over at a group nearby.

A man and a woman sit on opposite sides of the room. Both of them staring outside at the trees and the park, the windows blurry with rainfall. Chloe hasn’t seen them here before.

‘Are they new here, Nan?’

‘Hmm?’

‘That man there and the