Rise and Fall

Life has reinvented the definition of rock bottom so many times for twenty-six-year-old Sadie Blake.

When her parents divorced she received a new stepfather, countless bruises and a major aversion to alcohol. With her stepfather she inherited a depressed mother, new siblings and a reckless stepsister. With her stepsister, an abandoned baby nephew and a lifetime of responsibility...

Responsibility has never frightened Sadie. For so long it's been all she's known, thrown into situations outside her control and forced to just find a way to make it work. But the kind of responsibility and obligation Sadie has had to endure in her young life isn't sustainable for anyone, let alone a vulnerable teenage girl just trying to keep her family safe; and the repressed memories and overwhelming darkness lingering always in the back of her mind grow more menacing by the day, begging to be seen and felt, and threatening to consume her altogether.

Through enlisting the help of a therapist, Sadie realises her list of regrets is a lot more comprehensive than she first thought, and topping that list are two very different but equally important people - Ruben Foster and Camden Jones - neither of which she has seen in over a decade, but who she comes to learn will be key to her positively moving forward in life with her eleven-year-old nephew. But the process of trudging through their respective shared pasts is proving a lot more challenging than she anticipated...