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

our little girl would one day come home. Hell, I even went along with it when she was so convinced that you were her, but in here’ – he pats his chest – ‘I knew you weren’t her, and I had this anger, this utter resentment that not only had I suffered so much but now I was being goaded for it, and when you started saying you’d had a dream and I just realized how utterly stupid the whole thing . . . perhaps I did want to confess to you, I wanted you to know that I thought the whole fecking thing was crazy, because I’d tried telling Maureen and . . .’

He drops his head into his hands.

‘Does it sound strange to you? Does it? That perhaps I wanted you to put an end to it once and for all . . . I don’t know.’ He sweeps his hands over his face and sighs. ‘I don’t know.’

Chloe sits alongside him. The road and the fields are completely black now. Not a single car has passed in all this time. It is cold and so she shuts her passenger door. Patrick does the same, then switches the interior light back on. He turns to her.

Chloe swallows in the darkness, then tries to speak: ‘But I don’t understand . . . I mean, an affair? That was it? You could have told Maureen, people forgive people who—’

‘You don’t understand, Chloe.’

‘So tell me,’ she says. ‘Because whatever you’d done, whatever you said you—’

‘Because it was Josie, all right? Because the woman I was having an affair with was Maureen’s best friend. We were the two people who had to pick up the pieces after Angie disappeared. How was I meant to tell her what we’d done? The two people who she needed more than anyone.’

‘Josie?’ Chloe gasps. She’d convinced herself Josie hated Patrick, that perhaps she even suspected him like she did.

‘Did she know? Did she search for Angie with you?’

Patrick shakes his head. ‘She’d left by the time I turned around and realized Angie was gone . . . I searched for her myself, and when I told everyone she’d disappeared from the park, well, Josie knew that’s where we were going afterwards . . . I lied to everyone, Chloe, just to keep my family together when it had already fallen apart.’

He sinks back against his seat and stares at the roof of the car. Chloe has noticed that the windows have steamed up now. Nobody could see in, or out.

‘But Josie?’ Chloe says finally. ‘How could you?’

Patrick turns to her quickly. ‘We all have secrets, Chloe,’ he says. ‘What about you and all those newspaper clippings?’

Chloe looks at him quickly at the mention of her archive. So he had seen it.

‘Yes, I saw them,’ Patrick says. ‘You’re not so innocent yourself, are you, Chloe? None of us are, not if we’re really honest. Not one of us can get through this life without telling some lies, we just better hope the consequences aren’t too painful. But we’ve all got something to hide, Chloe.’

‘So why didn’t you tell Maureen? About the cuttings, I mean.’

‘And extinguish the only flicker of hope she’s had in twenty-five years? I’m a coward, Chloe, don’t you know that by now? Perhaps that’s another reason I told you we weren’t at the park. Maybe I knew by then that somehow we were bound in this together.’

They sit there like that for a long time. Patrick broken by his confession, Chloe trying to take it all in – even her own culpability. Finally, he speaks.

‘So what now?’

‘What do you mean?’ she says.

‘Well, are you going to tell Maureen? Are you going to be braver than I ever was? Are you going to be the one who breaks her heart? To tell her that her husband and her best friend . . .’

Chloe looks out of the window. Patrick continues:

‘I mean, she’s sitting there at home, waiting for fish and chips, all this time thinking that you could be our Angie come back. So what are we going to do? What the hell are we going to do?’

She hates the way he says ‘we’. But he is right. She is complicit.

‘I . . . I don’t know,’ Chloe says. Where to start?

Patrick sighs. ‘I thought she’d have given up this silly fantasy by now. I thought she would have woken up to the truth, but she’s talking about doing a piece in the paper, about informing the police, and what do we do then? I mean, it’s ridiculous, it’s all out of control, and all because I couldn’t break my wife’s heart nearly three decades ago. I’m a fucking coward.’

He leans his elbows on the steering wheel and covers his face with his hands. In the dimness of the interior light, Chloe sees his hands are still stained in places with the blood of the hare. She knows that will wash off, but some things cannot be undone. If this is really what happened, then she had got Patrick wrong. Perhaps he was right, perhaps it would have been crueller still to break Maureen’s heart all those years ago. The chances that it could have brought back Angie were still slim. He had weighed them up and decided to risk it, and he had lived with that decision every day since. In some ways, yes, he was responsible for his daughter’s death, but not in the way that Chloe had imagined. Patrick wasn’t a killer.

‘Let’s go home,’ Chloe says. She can’t think straight and they can’t spend all night on this road.

‘Yeah?’ Patrick says.

She nods and slowly he sits forward and turns his keys inside the ignition.

They don’t speak for the few miles that it takes to drive back to Low Drove. There is a solemnness inside the car, a silent undertaking that they will each keep the secret that has been revealed out on that lonely flat road. Just like Patrick all those years ago, Chloe doesn’t know if it is the right thing to do. For some reason she thinks of Nan, of all the times that she has pretended that Stella was