<div class="floatleft">(http://i981.photobucket.com/albums/ae300/windowpanenovel/Caitlynn.jpg)<br/><div align="center">Caitlin "Cait" Haslett</div></div>She was just a small-town girl who started her own candle business out of her mother's basement during her senior year of high school. It was her dream to go to the big city and open up her own store. That was five years ago and fast forward to present day Parker, Colorado - not too much has changed. Caitlin isn't sure where the time, or all the progress she was supposed to have made, went. The store did well enough. She had some steady customers, the tourist and holiday crowds, and a few over-seas distributors. But even keeping the overhead as low as possible and being an employee of one, there was little left over at the end of the month except whatever she was able to pay off on her four credit cards. She got by month to month like that for a while. Bust out of the blue she had one distributor back out and the cost of her organic/all natural wicks just went up - all in the same month. Neither of which she had planned for nor did she have any kind of financial buffer to help soften the blow. So now Cait finds herself broke, overworked, and down to her last month of payment for the lease of her small store (not to mention for the apartment she rents above it).<br/><br/>Every moment of her day was now spent trying to re-crunch numbers or find some kind of loophole somewhere she could slip through to survive. If not, what were her options? She could go home and join the family business - minimum wage jobs with no pension and home sweet home in their own row of trailer homes in one of the local parks. Well, at least they were happy. Most days she was too tired and stressed and overworked to feel anything. But this place was her dream. Cait still had a picture of her first sale - a little girl who bought a candle as a gift for her mommy for Mother's Day. (Well the mom had bought it but still!) The picture hung behind the counter to remind her of what she felt that day and what she was fighting for.<br/><br/>Days passed and she decided that nothing more could be done. And so she just kept selling one candle at a time, waiting for the lights to be shut off or the bill collectors to come or to get the eviction notice in the mail. The worst case scenario was already happening. What more could they do? Take away her birthday? That next Sunday (the store is closed, but like always, she is still working) Caitlin is rooting around in dark storage room, looking for what she hoped was a box of supplies that she had misplaced. She finds a handful of wicks and some 2nd rate wax that she had promised not to use. But, broke chicks can't be choosers. As she turned to head back to the store front, she tripped on a loose tile edge and fell. Slamming her shoulder into a nearby stack of boxes caused a chain reaction that ended with her almost being toppled over by a tall shelf as it came crashing down.<br/><br/>"Hell." She picked herself up and surveyed the damage. "Great.. I will probably be expected to pay to fix that as well."<br/><br/>After scrambling for her life and picking up the shelf's contents, Caitlin saw a small sliver of light coming from the wall where the shelf had been. Was that? There was a door! Forgetting all about the wax and all the projects that needs to get done for the day, Caitlin's curiosity gets the better of her and she decides to take a peek. It opened to a staircase which leads downstairs to ... low and behold, a sublet apartment! "What the...?" She couldn't believe her eyes - It was a bit dark and dank but in no way worse off than the above apartment that she was currently living in. Searching through the rooms (it had working electricity and water somehow!) she soon realized that there was even an exterior entrance, a bricked-up door leading to the alley behind the building. It only took her a little nudge for the bricks to fall away.<br/><br/>She stacked the bricks up neatly in the storage room and did some more surveying of the apartment. Hell, it was even furnished! Well, it needed some dusting but hey, elbow grease she's got. That night Caitlin sat at her small kitchen table and stared into her mug of weak tea.  She has a dilemma and a decision to make - alert her landlord or just sublet the apartment herself. The latter would give her the rent and lease payment money and allow her to keep her shop open for a little while longer. If she went to the landlord, he would just get another renter and she would still be in the poor house. There was some weird writing on the floor in one of the extra rooms down in the apartment, but Cait just assumed it was graffiti or oddly placed dirt/scrapes. One more thing to clean.<br/><br/>Now being a generally upstanding citizen, she had her qualms. She was in affect lying to her landlord and he might evict her on principle for finding out. Or worse. But he hadn't been by in weeks and she paid her lease and rent on time. Besides, he hated the smell of candles. So that was that, tne next day she put a want ad in the paper (and a few flyers in the local laundromat and coffee shops around town).<br/><br/><strong><span class="bbc_size" style="font-size: 12pt;">Wanted: Tenant for basement apartment. Call and ask for Cait at Heaven Scent for more information.</span></strong><br/><br/>She would prefer to find a woman and said as much on the flyer. She included the main phone number to the shop in the ad and went back about her business. Maybe everything wouldn't go to hell after all.<br/>