The Imposter by Anna Wharton (i have read the book txt) 📕

second, knowing that just inches from her nose those bottles of pills may be standing in a haphazard fashion behind the small mirrored door – had she even remembered to put them back where she found them in her panic?

‘Oh, yeah, sure,’ Chloe says.

She hands the brush to Maureen, who steps into the bathroom and takes her place between Chloe and the shower cubicle, still opaque with steam. Chloe pushes her hair back behind her shoulders as Maureen starts to tease the knot out of her hair silently.

She smiles as she brushes her hair slowly. ‘I haven’t done this in a long time,’ Maureen says.

Chloe realizes she must be talking about Angie.

‘No, I don’t suppose you have,’ she says.

Maureen holds Chloe’s head so tenderly with her left hand while the right hand works on the knot. Chloe doesn’t feel her head tug once.

‘Wow, you’ve really got the touch, haven’t you?’ Chloe says as with each sweep of the brush more matted hair is released.

But Maureen doesn’t stop once she’s got the knot out; instead she starts to brush the rest of Chloe’s hair, a look of deep concentration on her face. Chloe reaches for the sink to steady herself. In the clearing mirror, she watches Maureen’s reflection. Does she really need all those tablets every day? Chloe isn’t even sure what each one does, or what Maureen needs them to do.

Maureen stops brushing and sweeps her right hand down the length of Chloe’s hair.

‘Lovely,’ Maureen says, ‘almost black, just like . . .’

The two women meet each other’s eyes in the mirror. Chloe sees the hint of a puzzle appear in Maureen’s expression.

‘Well, I’d better get to work,’ Chloe says finally. She holds out her hand for the brush. It takes a second for Maureen to hand it to her.

‘Yes, of course, there you go, love.’

Maureen leaves the bathroom and when Chloe hears her bedroom door close she crosses the landing to her own bedroom to dress.

Chloe catches the bus into town, sitting among her fellow commuters as she does every day. The only difference is that they’re heading to jobs, whereas she’s leaving hers until dusk. Because that’s what her role is at the Kyles’ house, it is a job of sorts. She has to keep reminding herself of that. As they drive towards the city, she envies these commuters their desks and when the bus slows for the roundabout beside the newspaper offices, Chloe looks up at the third floor and the safety of the archive. A place that had always seemed to yield answers, whereas now all she has is questions.

She can’t face Park House today so decides to go to the library. It’s warm and quiet there, the only other place in this city where she can sit peacefully among other people’s stories.

She takes her phone from her pocket and sees that Claire Sanders has left another message for her. She doesn’t need to listen to the voicemail to know what it is – talk of power of attorney and deeds and paperwork and a tangle of all the things Chloe tries hard to avoid. The bits of black and white that threaten to pin her down. In one previous message that Chloe made the mistake of listening to yesterday, Claire Sanders even mentioned how she’d called her office phone and someone had told her she’d left. Chloe’s insides had twisted at the thought of the umbilical cord between her and the archive being cut so bluntly. Chloe curses herself again for ever giving Claire her office number. But that was at the beginning when none of this could have been foreseen. Back then there hadn’t been consequences, just the here and now, just what felt right on that particular day.

At the library, she heads straight for the research centre. It is housed inside a glass room in the middle of the main library floor and more often than not, it is empty. Just like the archive, Chloe knows, if people don’t use it, they’ll lose it. She’s never understood why people enjoy novels more than real life. The research centre houses an archive of hundreds of digital newspapers, census records, old telephone directories. It seems a strange irony – even to Chloe – that she’s more comfortable in fact than fiction.

She hangs her coat on the back of the chair and presses a key so the sleeping screen lights up. The research centre overlooks the children’s reading corner, and while she waits for the program to load, she watches a mother with a little girl of about three or four. The girl toddles around, pulling books with colourful spines from the shelves and scattering them at her feet. Her red T-bar shoes march over their hard covers with little respect for the stories inside. Her mother has black hair – like Maureen – tied up in a messy bun and she tidies in her daughter’s wake, trying her best to entice her over to some colourful cushions where they can read together.

Would Maureen have done this with Angie? Not that this particular library existed back then. Now the old red-brick library is a Chinese restaurant, although Chloe remembers it when it was fusty and full of books. She has a fuzzy memory of her own mother leaving her there once. A wall of books she can’t see over is still enough to stoke that panic in her. A librarian had found her crying in fiction. She’d lifted her onto the counter and had let her stamp the return dates into the front of borrowed books. For those few hours of her childhood Chloe can honestly say she was truly happy. So happy that she cried sad tears when her mother returned, and, assuming they were tears of relief, the librarian tore strips off her mother. Strips that her mother then tore off her all the way home. Nothing was ever her fault, after all. It was always Chloe’s. Her fault for being born.

Maureen wouldn’t have been that kind