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

head or her stomach. She goes for her head.

‘Oh lovey,’ Maureen says, getting up from her chair and rushing to her side. She puts her hand out to her forehead just as Chloe knew she would. She holds it there, and Chloe presses her head forward, as if Maureen’s palm could take away not just this fictional pain, but all of it. All of it always. Why is it that nothing can stay the same forever? Chloe feels like she might cry.

‘Well, you haven’t got a temperature, so that’s a good thing,’ Maureen says.

She guides her by her elbow to a chair at the table, pulling it out and encouraging Chloe into it. On the draining board, upside down, there are six pink plastic beakers, the kind you might find in a school or a nursery. Maureen sees her staring at them.

‘Let me get you a glass of water,’ she says. ‘These are new – for you.’

Maureen pours her water into one of the beakers and Chloe takes it in two hands. She takes a sip as Maureen sits down opposite her.

‘Patrick not here?’ Chloe asks.

‘Hmm? No,’ Maureen says, ‘though he shouldn’t be too long. Why? You’re not thinking you need running to the doctor’s, are you? I mean, I’m sure he would – of course he would – but you don’t feel that poorly, do you, love?’

Chloe shakes her head. ‘I’ll be fine, I just need some rest. There’s been something going round at work, it’s probably that.’

Maureen sighs. ‘Probably . . . I remember when you . . .’ She stops.

‘When I what?’ Chloe asks.

‘It’s nothing,’ Maureen says, looking down at the tablecloth and running the seam of it round her index finger. ‘Well, I was going to say, I remember when you . . . well . . . I remember when Angie started school, there wasn’t a day when she didn’t come home with something – when you didn’t come home with something.’ She says the last bit as if it’s a new dress that she’s still trying on for size.

Chloe looks down into her lap. All she can see, all she can hear, is him. She looks up again quickly, into Maureen’s trusting face, just inches from hers. She wants to tell herself that there is enough between them, that even if Maureen knew for sure that she wasn’t Angie, that she would still keep her, that they’d still have each other.

‘What is it, love?’ Maureen says suddenly. ‘You really don’t seem yourself.’

Chloe reaches for Maureen’s hand. The two parts of her heart pulling away from each other. Had she come here to deceive? That wasn’t what she had thought she was doing. And yet, she can’t tell the truth.

‘It’s just . . . it’s just . . .’

Maureen takes her hand and holds it.

‘What is it, Chloe, love? Has something come back to you, is this what it is? Have you remembered? Is that why your head is hurting?’

Chloe clutches her temples, because now it really is hurting. She flashes back for a moment, to the car, to the conversation with Patrick. Snapshots race through her mind. She has to tell her. She has to tell her. But Chloe’s uncertainty – or perhaps hope – that she’s still got something wrong nags at her. Worse is a fear that Maureen hasn’t been honest either, that she knows Patrick wasn’t at the park that day. But hadn’t she run through that thought earlier? Hadn’t she discarded it as impossible?

‘It’s just I was telling Patrick this morning, about a dream I had.’

Maureen shuffles closer; she’s on the edge of her chair.

‘It was different – to others, I mean.’

Maureen nods. She feels her squeeze her hand, as if to help her go on.

‘It felt . . . it felt like I’d been there before, and, well . . .’

‘Been where, love?’

‘A park.’

Maureen blanches. Chloe tries to read what she can from the look on her face, but it’s blank. Why? Because she knows nothing, or she wants to make it look like she does? Chloe reaches for her head again.

‘I was in a park, and it was only me and Patrick, and the grass, it was long . . .’

Maureen sits straighter. ‘What length?’ she says.

‘What?’

‘The grass. I mean, here?’ She points to ankle height. ‘Here?’ She moves up to over her knees.

Chloe thinks of the picture, the one she had studied that morning back at Nan’s. Thank God.

Her hand hovers just around her own knee.

‘Well, it would be here now, but then . . .’

‘When?’ Maureen says, quickly. ‘Try and remember, Chloe.’

Chloe hears a car on the road outside; her eyes flicker to the window – not that she’d be able to see – but Maureen remains bolt upright in her chair, pleading with her eyes for more. Chloe starts speaking faster, in case it is Patrick arriving home.

‘I was little. The grass, then, it was . . . it was almost to here.’ She shows Maureen by making a line right across the middle of her neck. ‘And there were swings, yellow ones.’

Maureen lets go of Chloe’s hands just in time for the pair of them to hear for sure Patrick’s tyres crunching on the pebble drive. A little gasp escapes Maureen’s mouth.

The car door slams.

‘Well, Patrick . . . he was there one minute and then the next . . .’

‘Gone?’ Maureen asks.

‘Well, yeah, gone . . . I, I don’t know . . .’

Maureen gets up from her chair and almost floats across the kitchen just in time to see Patrick heading from the car past the window by the sink.

‘I don’t know what it means,’ Chloe says.

‘What it means?’ asks Maureen, her face a wide and brilliant smile that takes two decades off the woman standing before Chloe. ‘What it means is that your memory is coming back. Don’t you see? The park is where Angie disappeared from. I can still see it that day: long grass – just like you said – yellow swings. That’s where you were with Dad when . . . when . . . oh Chloe! Oh Angie!’

‘So I did disappear from the park?’ Chloe asks.

‘Yes! Yes,’ Maureen says. Half laughs, half cries. She’s wiping those same tears away when Patrick comes through the back door. He stops when he sees Chloe there. He hesitates, one foot suspended