The Imposter Anna Wharton (e novels to read .txt) 📖

here her eyes settle on the front room, a room kept purely for storage at the moment and one she’s never been in before. The door is still ajar, just as it was that first day Maureen showed her around. She can see through the gap in the door that it’s filled with nothing more than boxes, each labelled with a different room in the house, but as she passes, she makes a note to take a look inside when she can.

She enters the kitchen, her flat heels clapping on the black and white lino.

‘Morning, Chloe, love,’ Maureen says, quieter than usual.

Patrick sits behind his newspaper at the kitchen table, his curly hair more unkempt this morning. He rakes his hand through it without looking up at Chloe. He is reading a story about the missing fireman Chloe had overheard on the news last night. He looks up and sees her watching him and turns the page of his paper.

Chloe goes about her usual routine, taking a bowl from the cupboard for her cereal, crossing the kitchen to take a spoon from the drawer. Its runners grate in the silence.

At the table, Chloe looks between Patrick’s newspaper and Maureen, who stirs her tea slowly, looking down.

Outside, bare trees sway in front of a pale sky. Chloe spoons cereal into her mouth, watching Maureen when she gets up from her chair to cut Patrick’s sandwiches slowly with a sharp knife. She wraps them in clingfilm and leaves them on the worktop. She steps back, returns to her chair. On cue – as if the pair of them have been choreographed – Patrick gets up and scoops his sandwiches from where she’s left them. He hesitates then, as if, for a second, he forgets the steps. He goes to give Maureen a kiss as he usually would before he leaves for work, but she gets up and leaves the kitchen, his kiss hanging in the cool of the air she leaves behind. He glances at Chloe then and she quickly looks down into her bowl, then he leaves.

Maureen doesn’t return to the kitchen until Chloe hears his car start.

What’s gone on between them?

Chloe wonders whether she should ask about the argument she overheard last night. She eats her breakfast slowly while she considers how to put it. But Maureen is now setting up her sewing machine at the table, and Chloe feels the moment has passed. She watches Maureen as she gets ready, pulling a length of material from her sewing box that Chloe recognizes, although she can’t say where from. Perhaps she’s just seen Maureen working on it over the last few days.

She pretends to read the cereal packet, one eye on Maureen as she winds orange thread onto the bobbin. Chloe lifts her bowl to make more room for her. Maureen thanks her quietly.

Across the table, Maureen picks up the material and breaks the silence between them by humming, winding the thread through the machine. Neither woman speaks, not even when Chloe gets up from the table and taps the contents of her bowl into the swing bin.

Chloe leaves the kitchen and goes upstairs to shower. She stands under the water, trying to piece together Maureen and Patrick’s argument from the night before with the snippets she had heard. Whatever it was they had argued about had rolled into this new day.

She turns the water off and dries herself with a towel. Once she’s put on her bathrobe, she opens the bathroom door to allow the steam to escape; it rushes out onto the landing, curling towards Maureen and Patrick’s bedroom. Chloe watches it in the mirror on the bathroom cabinet. She stops still, listening carefully for any noise from downstairs, and hears the sound of the sewing machine going. She gently pulls the cabinet door open. Inside, the usual medical remedies are stowed away neatly: indigestion tablets and ibuprofen pain relief gel, spare tubes of toothpaste and extra toothbrushes, and four different bottles of prescription medicine, each with Maureen’s name printed on them. One is out of date, the label faded, with only one or two tablets left inside the bottle, so Chloe puts that back on the shelf, but the other three were prescribed just ten days before Chloe arrived. She picks these up, one at a time. Diazepam she has heard of – isn’t that some kind of sleeping pill? But the other two, sertraline and mirtazapine, she’s not so sure about. Why would Maureen need all of these? Listening out again, the gentle hum of the machine gives her the cover she needs. She quickly returns to her room and grabs the pale blue notebook that she’s not yet replaced in her black shoebox. She hurries along the landing back to the bathroom and quickly scribbles down the name and dosage of each pill alongside her other notes. She’s concentrating so hard on the spelling of each that she only realizes the sewing machine has stopped downstairs when she hears Maureen’s footsteps on the tread of the stairs. Chloe quickly pushes the bottles back into the cupboard and shuts the door just in time to see the top of Maureen’s head as she reaches the landing. She shoves her notebook inside her bathrobe, tucking it between her bare skin and her sleeved elbow, and desperately tries to rearrange herself into someone who looks less guilty.

‘You’re having a slower morning today,’ Maureen says as she appears on the landing. ‘Ooh, those stairs, they don’t get any easier, do they?’

‘Oh, it’s my boss, she’s in a bit later this morning so I don’t think anyone would mind if I . . . well, you know?’ Now Chloe is aware of herself panting a little. As a distraction she grabs her pink hairbrush and starts pulling it through her hair, stumbling on a particularly stubborn knot. Maureen watches her from the landing and sees how she struggles. She steps forward.

‘May I?’ Maureen says. She holds out her hand, and Chloe hesitates for a