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

believe – what we need to believe – and people think we’re mad for doing so.’

She’s not sure who she is talking about. She looks down at the photograph of Patrick and Maureen, and covers two fingers over Maureen’s face.

‘I don’t think you’re mad,’ Hollie says. ‘I’ve never thought that. Tell me what’s happened, Chloe.’

She turns the cutting over, pressing Maureen and Patrick’s faces against the carpet.

‘I thought I could help,’ Chloe says quietly into the phone. ‘It sounds ridiculous now, doesn’t it? But I really thought that I could bring her home, that I could fix everything. But maybe it wasn’t Angie I was trying to bring home, maybe it was—’

‘Wait, Chloe, you’re not making any sen—’

‘And then the lines got blurred, everything felt so confused and yet so familiar. I let them think . . . they told me . . . well, it doesn’t matter, but then they made me think—’

‘Who did? Chloe, who are you talking about? Who’s Angie? Can you stop talking in riddles for a second?’

Chloe turns the picture back over. It was true that she had wanted to help. She always wanted to help. She looks up and around her room. She pictures the nights when she had lain here in bed, listening to Nan’s soft breathing on the other side of the wall. It was enough for so long and she really thought this would be it. She always thinks that finally, she will be sated. In the early days, they’d chat through the wall, Nan always grateful to get a reply. For so long there had been nobody. Then her mind drifts back to the Kyles, wondering if it really had gone so wrong? Disappointment is nothing but reality failing to meet expectation. Hadn’t she heard that somewhere? And what had she expected? All she’d wanted was to find out what had happened to Angie. That was it, wasn’t it? She hadn’t asked for more; it wasn’t her fault if Maureen had convinced herself of something else. And then today, after all these weeks of searching for clues, Patrick had given her something bigger than anything he’d told the police. But why?

A horrible thought comes to mind, one so ugly she pushes it away before it has time to tie itself to her. Patrick had been the one to tell her that Angie was never at the park, but was he the only one who knew this? She pictures Maureen then, in her short pinny as she serves up dinner, her hands resting on her hips as she watches Chloe eat from the plate covered in bunnies.

No, Maureen doesn’t know anything about this. It is inconceivable to think she is complicit in his lie. Chloe shakes her head. She won’t have it. It is impossible to hold those two thoughts together. That woman, who has been so loyal in her grief all these years, who has trusted her husband implicitly. It would kill her to know he’s been lying to her. It would kill her to know that he has known all this time just what had happened to their daughter.

Hollie is still speaking, but Chloe cuts her short.

‘Hollie, I’ve got to . . . I’ve got to go.’

‘What do you mean, go? Go where? Where are you?’

‘I can’t explain at the moment.’

‘Chloe, you’re worrying me . . .’

‘Don’t worry, I’ll explain as soon as I can.’

And she hangs up. However hard the truth may be to hear, Maureen deserves to know what really happened to her daughter, and Chloe will be the one to tell her.

Chloe has decided to pretend she’s come home from work sick. She can already picture how Maureen will whittle, how she’ll reach a cold hand to her forehead to check her temperature, how she’ll insist Chloe needs to go straight up to her room and she’ll bring her a mug of hot steaming tea. Even this thought makes Chloe feel uneasy, of leaving Maureen down there with him, unknowing.

The bus rumbles along the potholed Fen roads and her stomach pitches up and down in time with the tyres. It reminds her of the first time she came out here – just for a look, she had promised herself. She had no idea then how things would turn out.

She stares out of the window, spotting the fields that are sown with sugar beet, the long straight lines of tiny lush green now competing with worms to push through the soil. Soon these fields will be thick with leaves, disguising the furrows that separate them by early summer. Chloe had thought she would still be here then, that she would watch this barren landscape turn technicolour with wild flowers, just as Maureen had described to her. But she knows that inside her coat she is carrying a bomb back to Low Drove. Information that will explode inside that house, maybe even further.

The bus pulls into a stop, and Chloe’s racing head stills for the time it takes to let passengers off. The doors close and the bus moves on down the road and it’s only then that she realizes. Her head has been so busy with thoughts of Patrick, for Maureen’s safety, with exposing his lies, that she hasn’t stopped for a moment to consider herself in all this. She pictures again Maureen’s concerned face when she walks in the door. She is all that Maureen has now, and this information – this bomb that she can detonate – will destroy that too. A clammy coldness creeps across her skin.

Patrick hadn’t told her as some kind of confession – why would he after all these years? No, he’d told her to make her as much of a liar as he is. He must feel confident she won’t tell Maureen. He knows that would compromise her own place in their house. She thinks he’s paid no attention to her all these weeks, but he knows her well enough to understand what she has come to mean to Maureen. What Maureen believes she could be to her. What she was convincing Chloe she may