Free When I Lost You: A Gripping, Heart Breaking Novel of Lost Love. by Kelly Rimmer Page A

that lifestyle, it would have changed everything. My life would look completely different now.’
    ‘I don’t believe that,’ Molly said as she frowned at me. ‘Twenty minutes ago you were telling me nonchalantly about getting shot in the pursuit of your career. Would you really have let money stop you?’
    My immediate reaction was to rip that statement to pieces. I gave myself a firm mental lecture – trying to remember that Molly had grown up with a kind of privilege that was as blinding as poverty itself could be. And she’d had a very tough day. Her ignorance was not malicious, but it was still infuriating.
    ‘Money stops people from my background from doing all kinds of things, Molly. When I started uni, I was the first person from my family to do so. If I’d dropped out, the best case scenario for me would have been to find some shitty, menial job and stagnate there for fifty years. The worst-case scenario…’ I shrugged. ‘Well, my other friends weren’t exactly model citizens and our pastimes weren’t always legal. Even if I’d been arrested just once, I’d never have had the freedom to travel the way I do now. It was the dream of this job that kept me out of trouble – but the path from there to here wasn’t exactly well-worn. No one else I knew back then had a professional career – God, half the people I knew had never worked at all.’
    ‘But if you’re determined enough that you would literally put your life on the line to do this job, time and time again – and talented enough to build the career you’ve achieved – I just don’t understand why you think you would have let anything stop you,’ Molly said quietly.
    ‘The thing most people don’t understand about poverty is that it feels like an impossible wall holding you back from a different life. When you’re on the ground looking up at it, it seems insurmountable. When you learn how to build a ladder, you realise it’s just a wall. That’s what education was for me – it was the way out.’
    ‘Isn’t there something like income support payments? From the government?’ Molly’s gaze wavered, and she pressed those words out towards me hesitantly. I had embarrassed her. I hadn’t intended to, but now that I had, I wasn’t entirely sorry it had happened.
    ‘There are, but they are very small and studying is a very expensive past-time,’ I said carefully. ‘I couldn’t have sustained it without the scholarship.’
    ‘I guess there are good things I never knew about Declan, as well as bad things.’
    ‘Your brother taught me to look for the good in people. Yes, our friendship was difficult and weird at times but it was worth it. Declan was a good guy. If what I told you today makes you think otherwise, then I shouldn’t have told you.’
    ‘No, you did the right thing. I’m just adjusting to the reality that he had a whole other side that I didn’t even see,’ Molly said. She glanced at me. ‘Dad was mortified when he started bringing you to our place, you know. He and Dec used to fight about you all of the time.’
    ‘He was trying to protect his son,’ I said quietly. Defending Laith twice in the one day? God, I’d lost my mind. ‘Maybe he was right to do so.’
    ‘Why on earth would you say that? You can’t seriously blame yourself for the decisions Declan made about his own life.’
    ‘It’s not about blaming myself, I’m just a realist.’ I was suddenly finding it difficult to look at Molly again, so I turned my attention to the centrepiece in the middle of the table. ‘There’s surely a good chance he’d still be alive had our paths never crossed. I never intended it of course, but he was exposed to that world through me.’
    ‘That is complete bullshit,’ Molly said. I raised my gaze to her and shrugged.
    ‘Perhaps.’
    ‘Look at my father, Leo – he’s sixty-four years old and he hasn’t taken a day off work since he left school. When Dad had that heart attack last year, the doctor told