Over The Rainbow

Sadie Daniels is a seventeen year old girl running from the USA after barely surviving two years of sexual and drug abuse at the hands of her half-brother and his friends. Her father has recently died; she has no mother and she is heading for the country estate outside Stellenbosch that she inherited from her father.

Although she has a supportive guardian and his loving family to live with, she wants to get away, to a different country, where she intends to end her life as she is too miserable and emotionally weak to go on.

On a long bus trip down the coast from Durban to Cape Town she mistakenly steps off the bus into the night in Grahamstown and walks into what she thinks is a hotel, looking for a room for the night. She meets a young man, Calvin, closing up the bar. He knows it is no place for a young girl on her own so he takes her to the home of his friends, where she spends the night on their couch.

The story opens when she wakes the following morning to find Calvin and his five friends, Dan, Brad, Michael, Douglas and Joey, gazing in awe at her. None of them know it then, but their lives will intertwine: she will bring happiness to their lives and they will save her life and strengthen her, although she has horrible events to encounter.

Strong bonds of friendship, of differing degrees, develop between her and the six of them and she decides to stay with them, for a while at least. She feels safe with them, and happy, something she thought she would never feel again.

Her new friends gradually realise that she left the USA after suffering through something horrific. They only learn the full extent of her past horrors months later after she goes through new trauma when she is badly beaten and raped by the same person who had killed a friend of theirs a year previously.

After coming out of a self-induced coma from the attack, she tells them the full details of her past and her wealthy background. She offers them the chance to move to her estate in Stellenbosch with her where they can live the lives they’d only dreamt of.

Once settled in their new home in Stellenbosch, the strong connection and physical feelings she and Calvin have had building for each other over the last year come to the surface and they admit their love for each other and get engaged and married.

With Calvin, Sadie starts to gain confidence in herself as a woman and a lover, discovering the joys and intimacy of the sexual side of a close, loving relationship; something she feared the scars of her past would prevent her from ever experiencing.

Her ultimate happiness is sealed when her brother comes back into her life, arriving at their doorstep to ask her forgiveness. Calvin’s acceptance of him being back in her life and her ability to overlook the pain he had caused her heals the last wounds in her life.

The story ends with her falling pregnant and the birth of their first child.