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

It’s not necessary for Chloe to explain herself to her friend. She has been there from the start, after all. She knows all her secrets. She just hopes that one day there will be fewer of them to keep. Chloe has felt the same, of course, each time she has hoped that this would be the one, that she would finally be content. She is as disappointed as anyone that her life has worked out this way.

Chloe waits until the very last of the mourners have filed out of the cemetery and then heads towards what would appear to be the wrong way out. She has one other thing she needs to do first.

She wasn’t there for the service, so it takes some searching, but finally she finds it among all the others. The earth has not yet sunk back to level on this particular grave, and a stone has only finally been put in place in the last week. Chloe bends down beside it. She lays her coat on the ground and sits on top of it so as not to ruin the new black dress that Maureen had run up on her machine.

‘Hello, Nan,’ Chloe says, gently smoothing the blades of grass with the palm of her hand as if they were fine strands of Nan’s own soft white hair.

She reads out loud the inscription on the grave:

Here lies Grace Hudson

1919–2004

Wife to Hugh

Mother to Stella, taken from this earth still an angel

Rest in Peace

It was simple enough, and even if Chloe had been able to have any input, she knew Nan well enough to know there wasn’t much more she would have wanted except to be mentioned alongside her husband and the daughter she lost at just six years old. If anyone knew the pain of losing a child, it was Nan. Her little girl had died of polio, the cruellest of childhood illnesses. Grace had been able to lay her daughter to rest, unlike Maureen, who had endured all those years of not knowing.

Chloe had considered coming to the funeral, even just to watch from afar, but in the end she had decided that it was too risky. Better to blend into the background. She had always been so good at that. She knew that she would celebrate Nan’s life in her own way, or all fifteen months that she had known of it.

Chloe had needed to change her mobile number, of course, but she was used to that. The only person who needed her new one was Hollie. She knew Hollie always understood, each time Chloe convinced her that this time would be the last. But what are best friends if they’re not someone who believes in you utterly? Hollie might not have liked it, but she at least understood Chloe’s search to feel whole, for that perfect place where she would finally belong. Perhaps it had just become one of those annoying habits you come to accept in those you love. We all have them, Chloe thinks.

She sits up and looks around the cemetery. She has other friends here, people she has said goodbye to, other services that she has attended – most that she hasn’t. She’s experienced enough loss in her life to know that you celebrate people inside – that’s where you carry them with you, the people who have made a difference. And she hopes that she has at least done that – made a difference.

Chloe still has her own archive back at Maureen and Patrick’s. In fact, now she has left Nan’s, she has more of it there. In it, this morning, she had found among all the others one envelope marked Grace Hudson, and she had pulled from it a single cutting. The one where their story together had started. It only felt right to read it here today.

WOMAN THANKS BLUE WATCH FOR SAVING CAT

DINKY the tabby got more than she bargained for when she decided to steal up the drainpipe of a local block of flats.

Quick-thinking residents called 999 when they heard miaows coming from piping thirty feet off the ground.

Firefighters attended the block in the city’s Garton End Road with the turntable ladder, and under the watchful eye of residents, returned the cat to its owner, Grace Hudson.

Mrs Hudson, eighty-three, praised Blue Watch for rescuing her beloved cat. ‘I lost my daughter Stella when she was just six years old and my husband has passed, too. Dinky is all I have left in the world,’ she told this newspaper. ‘I have recently been diagnosed with dementia and so a local charity is helping me look after Dinky because I keep forgetting to feed her. She’s nineteen years old so, like me, she hasn’t got long left. We only have each other for company . . .’

Chloe pauses. She can still remember that day in the office, how her scalpel had hovered over this story before she cut it out to file it in the archive. Who wouldn’t have felt sorry for a poor old lady who had nothing in her life left except for her cat? She’d taken round some chocolates – and some cat treats for Dinky – and it turned out Chloe had lasted months longer than Dinky. At least she and Nan had each other, not that other people would have seen it like that. That’s why Chloe had to disappear. People never understand.

She will replace this cutting when she’s back home in Low Drove with all the others she has kept over the years. One day she will have a sideboard in a home of her own, and that’s where all the people who have made up her family will be kept. Family doesn’t have to be the same blood that runs around in your veins; its more what you curate over the years, the people you collect. Or that’s what Chloe likes to think. People say you can’t choose your family, but that’s where they are wrong.

Chloe sits for a while with Nan, until she remembers