Read Online The Liberation of Alice Love by Abby McDonald - Free Book Online

I’m surprised they haven’t started chasing you yet,” Julian said thoughtfully, after Alice had numbed her panic with two glasses of wine and they’d broken down the worst of the fraud. “Although it’s all pretty recent. Most of these only have one or two missed payments.”
    She shivered. “I still can’t believe I didn’t know it was happening.”
    Of everything, Alice wondered if her ignorance was the worst. All this time, she’d taken these ordinary things for granted: she opened a bank account, she paid her bills, she filed away her statements every month in the big black file marked “banking.” But now it turned out it wasn’t safe or secure at all. The most boring parts of her life were wide open for anyone to just stroll in and take—everything.
    Julian looked at his phone, restless. “We should probably wrap this up. Yasmin will be over at my flat soon, with the first of her stuff.”
    Alice stopped. “She’s moving in?” Her problems faded, just for a moment, as she looked at Julian in surprise. “When did this happen? I mean”—she recovered—“congratulations. You didn’t say.”
    Julian seemed flustered. He ran one hand over the crown of his head, from his neck to his forehead, flattening his hair in an awkward clump. “It wasn’t exactly planned. We were talking, and she said how she never saw me, and I said something about her living on the other side of the city, and then the next thing I knew…” He gave a small shrug. “It’ll be good, I think. Got to try it sometime, right?”
    “Of course, I’m sure it’ll be great for you.” Now it was Alice’s turn to be reassuring. “And you’ll finally have someone to cook for!”
    Julian made a face. “Not exactly. Yasmin doesn’t really do butter, or oil.” He paused. “Fats of any kind, really.”
    “Oh.” Yasmin had been with Julian for close to six months now but was still something of an enigma to Alice. She did something terribly important involving foreign buyouts at an investment bank and was forever slipping away from drinks or dinner with her BlackBerry to cajole somebody about sell rates in honeyed tones. Alice liked her, in the vaguely pleasant way she liked most of Julian’s girlfriends. Anything more was a wasted effort. But anti-butter? That didn’t bode well.
    “Thanks for the help, anyway.” Alice set aside the papers and showed him to the door. “I really appreciate it.”
    “It’s nothing.” Julian pulled her into another hug. “I just hate that some bastard would do this to you. You’ll call if you need anything else?”
    Alice nodded.
    “Hang in there.”
    She closed the door behind him and slowly sank back against the hard frame. That was something she hadn’t even begun to contemplate, what with the panic and terror and rush to discover the true extent of the damage. But now that those were out in the open, the question wrapped itself around her brain.
    Who had done this to her?
    Rodney and Julian said that it had to be criminal gangs, taking advantage of her perfect credit rating and large savings account, but Alice couldn’t understand it. Intercepting her mail, forging her signature—even if they’d been hunting through her rubbish for months and hacking all her online accounts, it was all unnervingly personal. The things they would have had to know about her to carry on, undetected, all this time: her date of birth and contact details were only the start of it. To even access a report of her current account by phone, Alice had often had to list her mother’s maiden name, random security words, town of birth, or the name of her first pet (a sadly short-lived hamster called Snuggles). How could someone know those things?
    A sudden sharp knock on her door broke through Alice’s reverie. She peered through the peephole to see her landlord waiting in the hallway, his arms folded and a scowl on his wrinkled face.
    She braced herself and opened the door. “Mr. Bloch,” Alice