Read Mistakes We Make for Free Online Page B

penny she could get to help her mum out.
    ‘Night, Cait!’ called Joe, who was guarding the door to stop latecomers sneaking in. ‘Safe home!’
    ‘You too.’
    She scurried through the car park. There were only four cars left. Earlier, she’d seen people driving round and round, searching for spaces. Shopping here was a stressful experience.
    Caitlyn didn’t have a car. She walked out of the car park and took the path along the river to the bridge. The bus to Summerfield left from the town hall, and she had just ten minutes to catch it or she’d have to walk the couple of miles home.
    From the far side of the bridge she could see the bus, waiting at the stop. She started to run. It was uphill, and by the time she got close she was puffing. The town hall clock read ten twelve. If Dan was driving, she’d be fine. If it was Jake, he might decide to leave early.
    She was fifty yards from the bus when she heard the engine start up and it pulled into the road.
    ‘Stop!’ She waved her hands frantically. ‘Stop! Oh please!’
    She glimpsed Jake’s face, resolutely averted, as the bus trundled past her.
    ‘ Bother you, Jake Thorogood!’
    She flopped down onto the low wall outside the police station, her feet already throbbing from long hours of walking round the store. Jake had been impossible since the time he’d made a pass at her at the pub Christmas social and she’d had to slap his face. Caitlyn despised her curves, she longed to be whippet thin so that clothes looked good on her, but it seemed her shape appealed to men like Jake. The wrong sort of men.
    She stood up resolutely. She’d have to walk; sitting here wouldn’t get her home. She turned towards Summerfield. It’d take her half an hour if she strode out, forty minutes at this pace. She didn’t have the energy for striding, so forty minutes it’d have to be. What was bugging her most was not Jake’s behaviour, nor even the fact that she’d have to walk; it was that by the time she got home there’d be no chance at all of seeing Iona May before she fell asleep.
    Caitlyn’s youngest half-sister was six years old and cute as a kitten, with soft, fluffy blonde hair, blue eyes as big as two moons and a little nose that turned up at the end. She didn’t look much like their mother and there was no resemblance at all to Mick Boyce, the child’s now-absent father – and thank heaven for that.
    She passed the last house in Hailesbank and stepped into the gathering darkness where the town lights ended. At least there was a pavement the whole way. She started counting steps. It was a mile and a half now. One thousand, seven hundred and sixty yards in a mile, that made two thousand, six hundred and forty yards. She couldn’t stride a whole yard though, so maybe three thousand steps till she was home. She resolved to count and got to one hundred and six before thoughts started crowding in.
    Like how good it would be not to have to share a room with her other half-sister, Ailsa. Like where she’d be now if she hadn’t resigned from Blair King a year ago. Like what her life would have been like if her dad hadn’t died and her mum hadn’t let Mick Boyce move in.
    She switched to counting cars that passed instead of steps. It was easier.
    Two the other way, just one going in her direction. Then a rival supermarket’s delivery van. The poor driver had obviously been working late too. Behind it, a string of cars.
    She lost count.
    Farm Lane, where Caitlyn lived with her mother, was about as unlike a farm lane as you could imagine. There was the old Crossed Keys pub at one end of it, and maybe that had been a barn or something a long time ago, because it was built of rough stone, but the rest of the lane was council housing. It was grey and dismal, and all the houses looked identical, except that some had tidy front patches with a small square of green grass and a few flowers, others had been concreted over so that there was no work involved in keeping