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

tries it. But the padlock is still there, keeping it locked tight. She climbs on top of her bed and peers onto the top of the wardrobe. She checks behind the curtain. Then finally flops down onto the bare mattress. Her archive has gone. And there’s only one person she can think of who might have it.

She stays up in her room that night. She doesn’t go down to dinner. Maureen brings her a plate of mince and potatoes up on a tray but she doesn’t touch a thing. She lets the room fall dark. She doesn’t switch on her own television. Instead she lies in the darkness, listening to the sounds that drift up through her floorboards: the chimes of the Nine O’Clock News, Maureen and Patrick chatting easily. There are no arguments to be overheard between the pair of them now. It’s as if everything has been settled. Chloe is Angie. Patrick has got away with murder.

A few hours later, she hears Maureen come up to bed. She makes out the sound of the bathroom cabinet opening, of Maureen running the cold water tap and swallowing down the tablets that regulate her days, that keep everything normal. Chloe wants to laugh – what is normal anymore?

She gets up and makes her bed in the darkness, then slips under the duvet. But she doesn’t sleep. Instead, she stares at her door, at the slit of light from the landing that casts a dull shine on the first few feet of floorboards inside her room. She can’t rest. Not when he’s downstairs. She imagines his hands all over her cuttings. Her cuttings . . . She wants to cry. So now they both keep a secret. And his only silences Chloe further.

Half an hour later, Chloe hears Patrick’s footsteps on the stairs. A dull thud that comes closer. He stops at the top of the landing. Chloe grips the duvet underneath her chin as a pair of feet come to a standstill outside her door. The light dims. She hears his breath on the other side of the door frame. She stares at the door handle, praying not to see it turn but she’s sure it moves momentarily. Someone’s grip on the handle the other side. She freezes in bed. But a second later the footsteps move away, towards the bathroom. She listens to the sound of the toilet flushing, to the taps in the sink, the water whooshing past her down the creaking drainpipes. Every sense is alert in the darkness. And long after he closes their bedroom door, Chloe lies awake staring at her black ceiling.

They say that at night, when the frontal lobes are least active, we are left with the more primeval parts of our personality. Intuition takes over from logic. So it makes sense that it is in the middle of the night, the early hours, when Chloe’s suspicions are strongest, when she rehearses in her head what she will say to Maureen come the morning, what she will reveal about the husband she adores. She practises over and over so she will get it right as the sun bleaches the black night blue behind her curtains. But by the morning, when she goes downstairs for breakfast, when the kitchen table is filled with bright packets of kids’ cereals, a plastic bowl and spoon for her, the world somehow looks more normal again. Normal, and at once strange.

Chloe rubs her eyes. She has hardly slept.

‘Let me get the milk for you, Chloe, love,’ Maureen says, as she tucks her chair under the table.

Patrick sits across from her. She doesn’t look up. Instead she feels his eyes on her. She thinks of her archive. She has no appetite.

Maureen fusses around her as usual, trailing a hand down the back of her hair as she moves between the table and the sink. Chloe shivers a little.

‘Any more dreams?’ Maureen says.

She has asked her this the last three mornings.

Chloe shakes her head. Maureen looks disappointed, as she has every other day.

‘We’ll have to be feeding you cheese before bed,’ she laughs.

Patrick laughs too.

‘Pat’s got some business in town later, so he’s offered to pick you up from work.’

Chloe looks up quickly.

‘Oh, I—’

‘It’s no bother, Chloe, love. Is it, Pat?’ Maureen says.

‘No, no bother at all,’ he smiles at her, and underneath the table, Chloe presses crescent shapes into her palm with her nails.

‘It’ll save you getting the bus, and they say there might be rain later,’ Maureen says.

Maureen shakes some Frosties into Chloe’s bowl, as she looks out of the window. Bright sunlight fills the kitchen.

Chloe nods as Maureen hands her Angie’s spoon.

Chloe eats slowly, the cereal sticking in her throat. She’s thinking of Patrick’s gun. Is that what business he has in town today? Is that why he hasn’t told Maureen? She’s picturing it lying in the back of the car later as they drive along isolated roads in the dark, back towards Low Drove. Not a soul around.

Chloe swallows her cereal too quickly. She coughs.

‘I was going to meet a friend later,’ she says, trying to clear her throat.

Both Maureen and Patrick look up.

‘A friend?’ Maureen says. She looks at Patrick quickly. ‘What friend, Chloe, love? We didn’t know Chloe had a friend, did we, Pat?’

Patrick shakes his head and leans forward on the table.

‘Hollie,’ Chloe says.

‘Hollie?’

‘Yes, Hollie.’

Maureen sits down slowly in the chair. She picks up a tea towel on the table and starts winding it around her hand.

‘You haven’t mentioned Hollie before, has she, Pat?’

Patrick shakes his head. Chloe looks between them, wondering why Maureen had found it necessary to check with him.

‘I’ve known Hollie my whole life,’ Chloe says.

Maureen lets out a little laugh. ‘Well, you can’t have known her your whole life . . .’ she says. ‘We’ve never heard of a Hollie, have we, Pat?’

Again, he shakes his head.

‘Can’t say we have,’ he says.

‘Oh . . . no, well, maybe not my whole life,’ Chloe says, suddenly backtracking. ‘But since, well, we were in foster care together.’

Maureen’s shoulders sink.

‘Oh,’ she says. Then