Free Before We Met: A Novel by Lucie Whitehouse Page A

protracted lie like that, another woman, another house. He wasn’t that sort of man. If he wanted to be with someone else, he’d just tell Hannah and be done with it.
    Pushing the chair back, she stood up and walked to the window. She leaned forward until her forehead rested against the cold glass. She was hot and her heart was beating quickly. She focused on the coldness against her skin and tried to think. If not another woman and not DataPro, then what?
    Debt. She stood up straight again, lifting her face away from the glass. What if he was in debt? Yes, that made more sense; that rang much truer than the idea of his having someone else. What if he had debts he was ashamed of, and couldn’t bear her to find out?
    Mark was someone who took risks; she’d always known that. Look at this place, DataPro: how many other twenty-three-year-olds came out of university, hired two of their contemporaries and offices in London, and started touting their services around the major financial players of the City? She would never have had the nerve to do that. Instead, she’d worked her way up in companies where the financial gambles were taken by other people and she could be sure of being paid at the end of the month. The idea of setting up her own business hadn’t even crossed her mind at that age.
    Yes, some sort of financial gamble, a risk that he’d taken and regretted – the idea took root. He loved brinksmanship, pushing his luck: she’d seen it even that very first afternoon in Montauk, when he’d swum out beyond the breakers. The current was strong all along the beach there; even very confident swimmers came unstuck against it. Now Mark was forty, he was less of a daredevil physically, he said, but over dinner the other day his friends the Kwiatkowskis had told her about the ski trips they used to go on together, before their sons Charlie and Paddy were born.
    ‘Well, we say we went on holiday together,’ Pippa had said, resting her elbow carefully on the table among the glasses and empty cheese plates, ‘but really we only saw Mark to speak to after dark. Dan and I would be pottering round on the blue runs, nerving ourselves up to try a red run on day three, and we’d see Mark from the ski lifts, all in black like the man from the Milk Tray ads, hurtling past on his snowboard as if the hounds of hell were after him or something.’
    ‘There was this one afternoon,’ said Dan, ‘where I was literally thinking about the protocol for repatriating his body – would we have to go through the embassy or would the insurance company sort it out? Pip and I were feeling pretty smug – we’d just done this hairy red run and we were—’
    ‘Hairy!’ Mark laughed. ‘It was a nursery slope.’
    ‘It was the hardest of the red runs, pal. Anyway, we were getting the lift back up and we saw him coming down this black run. Jesus . . .’ Dan shook his head. ‘One side of the run was fairly smooth, steep as hell, obviously, but at least it was covered in snow. The other half . . . Basically, it was a rock-face with a bit of snow here and there, where there was actually enough of an angle for it to stick on. Bear in mind this was the first week your husband had ever used a snowboard – we watched him come down that thing and I reckon the board must have made contact with the run only six times. He was bouncing from crag to naked crag – it made me feel sick just to watch.’
    Hannah turned her head and looked at the river, her heart beginning to slow down. Debt . . . If that was it, how had he got into it? A bad investment? It couldn’t just be something straightforward gone wrong. If he’d put money into a unit trust or something and it had tanked, it wouldn’t have left him in debt; he’d just have lost what he’d invested. And it would have been money he’d had to start with: you didn’t borrow to make that sort of investment; the returns weren’t high enough. You’d have to pay all the fees and then enough to