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

resurfaces. She pushes it away. Blinks, restarts, but it’s still there when she opens her eyes. What other explanation is there?

She sits up straight, grabbing the cuttings once again from the floor. And now when she looks at the photograph – when she really looks at the photograph – she sees something different. She doesn’t see two broken parents, each holding up the other. She sees betrayal. She sees lies. She sees that same haunted expression in Patrick’s eyes that she’d noticed in the photograph Maureen had showed her on her first night in the house. She sees Maureen’s blind faith in him. She sees the gun he keeps secret from her. She sees the room he keeps locked. She sees why he wouldn’t believe Maureen when she insisted Chloe is Angie. Because if he and Angie were never at the park that day, why had he allowed everyone to think that they were? Why had he allowed the police to comb it? Why had he been lying to everyone for nearly three decades? And the only answer Chloe can come up with is because Patrick knows what really happened to Angela Kyle.

FORTY-THREE

‘Chloe . . . is that you? I can’t . . . maybe it’s a bad line. Chloe, are you there?’

The phone lies limply in Chloe’s hand. Hollie sounds worried.

‘Chloe, speak to me. Just let me know you’re OK.’

She wants to talk to her, she really does. But where is she going to start? The beginning of it all feels decades ago now.

‘Hollie,’ Chloe says finally, her voice more of a croak. Hollie is the first person she has spoken to since Patrick dropped her off that morning. It is now nearly one o’clock. She has been sitting on her bedroom floor, combing through the discarded cuttings for hours, trying to find something – anything – that gives her an alternative explanation, one that doesn’t involve Patrick’s guilt.

‘Oh Chloe, I was worried sick for a moment, you sound terrible. Are you OK?’

Chloe nods into the phone.

She hadn’t known where to go after Patrick’s revelation had sunk in. Back to Elm House? The thought now filled her with fear. She’d briefly pictured Maureen, wondered whether she might be in danger. Every time she thought of her, all she could see was her trusting face. But how could Chloe go back there now? How could she eat at their table? Hold that plastic cutlery while Patrick watched on? His confession hadn’t just made a liar of him – perhaps that’s what was breaking Chloe’s heart.

She’d thought about going to see Park House, but what solace could Nan offer? If Chloe was really honest, what had she ever offered? Suddenly everything that Chloe thought she knew seemed different in this new light. Everything once solid now slipped through her fingers like sand.

And then there was Hollie. She’d dialled her number, not knowing what she was going to say. But she needed to reach out to the one real thing in her life. Her constant.

‘Do you remember when we were kids?’ Chloe says suddenly. ‘Those games we used to play? The ones where our real parents would come and find us.’

Hollie laughs a little from the other end of the phone. ‘I haven’t thought about that for a long time.’

‘We couldn’t believe that they’d done that, that they’d left us,’ Chloe says. ‘And so we made them into new people. We shifted the shapes around until they made a different picture. One where we could like ourselves better. You remember, don’t you?’

‘My mum and dad were always doctors. Do you remember that?’ Hollie says. ‘I used to say they were too busy saving lives to come and get me. I invented all sorts of dramas that kept them at work.’

‘We played that game for hours,’ Chloe says.

‘Months,’ Hollie reminds her.

‘Years.’

The two women fall silent down the handsets. In truth, their parents hadn’t left them in the foster home where they had met as children, and they knew that really. The reality was they were put there by people who knew that’s where they would be safer. Two girls the same age, they had drifted towards each other, and then clung to one another in all the storms that followed. A bond was forged, they were one another’s lifebuoys.

‘They say that when we sleep, our brains make dreams that fit what we want to believe. Did you know that, Hollie?’

‘It makes sense, I guess,’ she says.

‘But perhaps it’s not just when we’re asleep. When we were little, we had to write new stories in our heads, or make up games so that we could feel better, so that we didn’t believe we weren’t worth loving.’

‘I guess that’s why we did it,’ Hollie says. ‘I haven’t really thought about it, but Chloe, all kids make up silly games.’

‘But it wasn’t just a game, was it? Not for me,’ Chloe says.

There is silence on the other end of the phone. An understanding.

‘What’s happened, Chloe? You know you can tell me anything. You know that I’ll understand.’

‘You stopped making up stories. You had Dave and Rita. Then you met Phil. You got your house. You wrote yourself a new story and you left me.’

‘I didn’t, Chloe. I never left you, I promised you I wouldn’t. I can’t feel bad that it worked out for me . . . All that other stuff, it’s in the past. And there’s no point looking back, just forward.’

Chloe presses the phone to her ear and shakes her head. What does she have to look forward to? She feels that vulnerability then, the fear she dedicates her life to suppressing. Would she even know how to make the same life Hollie has, if she had the chance? Does she want to? She’s not like everyone else, she knows this. She has always known this.

‘It’s funny how we get away with making things fit while we sleep,’ Chloe says. ‘But we do the same when we’re awake, we sieve through everything, everyone, taking just the bits that fit what we want to