style="font-size:15px;">
Booklist
TRINITY WALKER WAS having a bad day. In a life that had been punctuated by bad days, it was a drop in the ocean. Sadly, they were beginning to have an accumulative effect.
She was twenty-four years old but she suddenly felt ancient.
She’d just needed three more days. Come Monday her government payment would be in the bank and Oscar would be walking through the school gates for the first time.
She could finally get some order to their lives.
Regular child-free hours to dedicate to a job that would bring in regular money for things like rent instead of relying on government support and a variety of other dodgy alternatives.
Couch surfing, shonky hostels, single room rentals in share houses and the occasional night—like last night—sleeping rough in her ancient Mazda, was no life.
Not for her or her five-year-old.
Every now and then she’d get lucky and land a job with some form of accommodation attached. A room, sometimes a small flat or bedsit. It never usually lasted though. More often than not it was Oscar’s health issues that ended the job and therefore their housing. Yesterday it had been Terrible Todd.
Her big, ugly, bearded, tattooed boss who drove a motorbike and reeked of cheap cologne and engine grease. Todd had announced that he did, after all, want her to pay for the accommodation.
Just not with money.
He’d felt they could come to an arrangement. She’d walked.
Bastard.
Bloody hell, why even bother with a permanently stressed-out, exhausted single mother who wasn’t even that much to look at? She was five feet four, her long dark brown hair was so fine it hung limply down her back and she was somewhat on the thin side.
And not the sleek, glowing, deliberate thin of a catwalk model. The stringy, wrung-out thin of a woman who’d been stressed and struggling to make ends meet for the last five years. She’d used to be passably pretty back in her size twelve days, but even a fairy godmother would baulk at Trinity’s current state.
Hell, it had been so long since she’d even thought of herself as a sexual being it always surprised her when someone else did.
Someone like Terrible Todd.
And here they were. With nowhere to go and no money to pay for anything much until Monday. Homeless again.
Homeless.
The word cast a sinister shadow as a cold hand crept around her heart. Fear over the welfare of her child, always present, threatened to overwhelm her.
Seriously, when was she going to ever catch a freaking break?
Maybe she could impose on Raylene again for the use of her couch tonight. Just one night. They could go after dinner and be gone by breakfast so Raylene, who was also doing it tough, wouldn’t have to feed them.
‘Look, Mummy! Look at all the ducklings. They’re hungry.’
Trinity broke free from the sticky tendrils of anxiety. She was sitting on a park bench about two metres from Oscar, keeping an eye on him near the pond’s edge, but had mentally tuned out.
‘Yes, darling.’ She smiled.
Her own belly growled in hunger as she also smiled at the old man standing next to her son at the pond’s edge. He’d brought the bread with him about ten minutes ago and Oscar had followed him from the slippery dip like the freaking Pied Piper.
The elderly gentleman had said hello to her and had looked down and smiled at an eager Oscar as he’d asked
