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

their way around the kitchen. Somehow it had felt wrong to hear them raking through the contents of Maureen’s kitchen cupboards; she didn’t want them judging Maureen for the plastic pink beakers she keeps just for Chloe, or the Bunnykins cutlery they would find in the drawer. They wouldn’t understand. They couldn’t comprehend a mother’s pain, why she has desperately clung on to these things of Angie’s all these years.

To be honest, Chloe is glad for the breathing space. The air is thin in the living room and after a while her head had started to spin. Whatever she has been doing here in the Kyles’ house these last fourteen weeks, something about the rawness of emotion she had just seen had made her feel uncomfortable – guilty even – about bearing witness to Maureen and Patrick’s pain. After twenty-five years this was a moment that belonged to no one but them. Chloe needs to give them time to take it all in.

She stirs the tea and listens out. There is no sound coming from the living room now. In the kitchen, the uniformed officers’ radios crackle quietly as they sit at the small pine table.

‘Have you been renting a room here long?’ one of the officers asks her.

She stops stirring the tea. Her back to both officers. They make it sound so impersonal. Chloe takes a split second to remind herself that she has done nothing wrong, that these police officers are not here to interrogate her. They’ve come to tell Maureen and Patrick that Angie has been found. She still can’t quite believe it.

‘A few months,’ Chloe says, turning round and pressing two hot mugs into their hands as if she hopes it might distract them from too much questioning. It seems to work.

The officers nod and thank her for the tea. She suddenly would rather be in the living room with Angie watching from the sideboard, the solemn faces of the two detectives and all of Maureen and Patrick’s pain.

Chloe turns and faces her reflection in the black kitchen window, realising that in all the commotion she is yet to remove her coat. It’s over for her here now – with this news, Maureen’s fantasy must come to an end. She’s known that since that moment on the drive; her mind had leapt two steps forward in an instant to know what this news meant for her. She doesn’t know yet how it will all play out, when they might ask her to leave, but she’s surprised to find that she doesn’t care. Tonight is about Maureen and Patrick. Hadn’t she always planned to bring Angie home? And now that was done, her reason for being here was gone.

She puts five mugs onto a round tray and carries them carefully through to the living room. The detective now sits on the sofa beside Patrick and Maureen, who have recomposed themselves a little and seem ready to hear more about how their missing daughter was found.

Chloe hands a mug from the tray to the officer in Patrick’s chair. He thanks her with a tight smile, everyone unsure of how they are supposed to behave after this bombshell has swept through the room. The detectives do a good job of seeming awkward, but surely they are used to this? Surely they do this all the time? She thinks about the reporters at the newspaper who were often sent out on death knocks just hours after someone had put an announcement in the newspaper. The receptionists would ring up and tell the news desk if it was a sudden death, or a young age, and a reporter would be dispatched to their home. They’d return to the office the same as they’d left, with a breezy demeanour, their priority only to empty their shorthand pads onto their screens in time for the next day’s paper. Perhaps they had sat in living rooms like this, an intruder into someone else’s most personal moments. Chloe’s job was only ever to file away what they had written. She’d never thought of the reporters’ lives outside of the office, of how close they were to both life and death.

Patrick sniffs and shakes his head when Chloe offers him tea. She puts a mug down in front of Maureen, who thanks her with a small voice, and the detective places her cup beside her feet.

Chloe takes her place at the very edge of the room in the hope of not being noticed. She’d always been good at fading into the background, of disappearing into the wallpaper. Over the years she likes to think she’s perfected the art of camouflage.

Patrick sits forward, balancing his elbows on his knees. He holds his head in his hands and then looks up.

‘Sorry,’ he says, ‘it’s just, well, it’s a shock, you know? After all these years.’

The detective nods, and glancing at Maureen again, Patrick reaches for his wife’s hand. Chloe notices how she squeezes it in return. He’s right, how could he have let go of her hand twenty-five years ago?

‘I don’t . . . well, I don’t quite know what to ask first, like,’ Patrick says. ‘I mean how . . . how was she found?’

The detective takes a sip of her tea and then holds the mug between two hands.

‘Another person was reported missing and it was actually during the search for her that Angela’s remains were found.’

Patrick nods. ‘I see . . . and where? I mean, where was she found?’

‘Not far from the park where she went missing.’

Maureen looks up quickly and a tiny sob escapes from her mouth.

‘You mean, she’s been there all this time, out in the cold?’ Maureen asks, her voice small, child-like.

Patricks wraps her up in his arms again, rocking her as she cries. But Chloe sees something that no one else in the room would notice, a relief in him that is almost palpable. She had been found not far from where he’d left her. They had been looking in the right place all along.

‘You may remember there was a building site