"Look at me when you talk to me."

Rose looka him in the eyes and whimpers, words unable to form. Sweat runs down her temples, and her red hair is plastered to the back of her neck. She is throbbing,shaking, reaching for the fulfillment of a deep and hollow longing. She can barely see or think straight, she wants the release of ecstasy so badly.

"Please, Sir, may I come?" her ragged voice asks.

"Beg me," is the stern command.

Only a year ago, she was her daddy's prim and proper princess. Sweet sixteen, Rose had been the red apple of her father's eye. Coming back from long business travels, he always brought her trinkets and treats by the dozens—cashmere coats, satin heels, silk dresses, a pair of emerald earrings, pearl necklaces in every color, soft Mulberry leather book bags, suede gloves, watercolors from street artists in Paris, London, and Rome, decadent Belgian chocolates, and, of course, Rose's favorite: books! Rare early editions were all brought back for his dear darling Rose, who read them ravenously.

She begged him to stay longer, pouting until he agreed to work from home for a weekend or delay his plane trip till the morning, but even Rose couldn't convince Theodore DeWitt Bukater to cancel a business trip. Sure, when she was small and he was still young, it was easy to leave things in the hands of his assistants and take a prolonged summer vacation in Nice, or spend a December in Aspen, but in those last years business arrangements were crucial. Though he tried to hide it, there was a desperate, painful plea in her father's eyes: Please, please don't think I'm failing you, he seemed to say.

One of Rose's best memories is the day her father showed up, out of the blue, at Dice Willows School for Girls. It wasn't like him to come out into the country, but he showed up one clear September morning un expectantly, saying his Manhattan flight had been delayed and he wanted to stop by to visit her. He was coming from London and dropped off a music box he'd picked up for her, a hand painted porcelain wonder that played the sweet longing tune of Chopin's nocturne and had a poised crystal ballerina spinning inside. "A ballerina for my little dancer," he told her. He took her and two of her best friends to lunch in town, then quickly dropped them back at school to make the next flight out.

"Come by more often!" Rose urged her dad over dessert, a decadent bread pudding with candied apples.

"Sweetheart, I wish I could spend every day of my life with you."

She was fourteen at the time. Two years later, a private plane carrying her father, five other passengers, and the pilot experienced engine problems, caught fire, and crash landed into the mountains of India. There were no survivors. And so Rose's world collapsed.

Sweet Ms. Cakedust came into her room several hours after lights out and woke her up from a fitful rest. Holding her hand, she calmly and sadly told Rose that her father had been killed.

Rose's screams were heard in the farthest reaches of the school. The other girls were in an uproar. All the lights came on. The teachers handed out deficiencies by the dozens. Rose screamed until her throat was raw. It wasn't until the headmistress, that dreadful Mrs. Freight, came in and shoved warmed milk and honey down her throat and clamped her mouth shut that she calmed down.

They gave her hot tea spiked with something that made her loopy and drowsy, so that the details of her father's death were delivered to her in frenzied bursts of wakeful cognition.

For weeks she thought it was only a dream. She came down with a fever and missed the funeral, hastily arranged by some uncertain uncle-by-marriage. She refused to accept the facts, instead waiting for the moment when her father would turn up, maybe a bit bruised from the crash, but otherwise alive and well. Or maybe he never got on the plane at all. Maybe he missed it.

But, no, eventually the remains were found. Tests performed. There was little flesh left to bury and lay to rest.

And now what would become of Rose? Her first visitors, upon being released from the school's sick ward, were her father's lawyers. Her mom died when she was small. The circumstances were suspicious. It was supposedly a car accident, but there was no evidence that her mother ever tried to hit the brakes on the cold and still night when her Mercedes careened off the road and off the side of a bridge. Her parents' marriage was never approved of—her dad's parents mistook her schoolteacher mother for a gold digger, and her mom's parents thought her father was a pompous asshole. So her mother's family wanted nothing to do with her—in fact, they chose to forget the pain of her mom's death by forgetting about Rose as well. As for her father's family, the lawyers explained that there was a deep and bitter power struggle. The DeWitt Bukater legacy had dwindled to nearly nothing, after a series of over expenditures and heavy stock losses. Too much had been borrowed. Too much had been staked. There was little, if anything, left to Rose at all. The house and most of her father's belongings would need to be sold by the bank to make up for the debts and losses.

By that point, Rose didn't care. She just wanted her dad back. She didn't care what the lawyers wanted from her. She didn't care about anything. After the second day of meetings, she refused to speak with them.

Again, it was Mrs. Freight who had to take charge. She allowed Rose to wallow in her dormitory for one week, then announced that she must iron her clothes, fix her hair, and begin attending classes again. Out of the goodness of her heart, she would allow Rose to finish out the term even though her tuition wasn't fully paid, but on the condition that she display the qualities of a model student, relinquish her spacious private room for a spare spot next to the school's kitchens, and pay her way by cleaning floors and serving dinners to the other girls.

Rose had attended Dice Willows for more than a decade. It wasn't her demotion that bothered her—it was the thought of being forced to leave.

"But then what is to become of me?"

"I've contacted your father's closest business associates, as your family doesn't seem too receptive to taking you in. One has agreed to answer for you."

"Who?" Rose asked, wildly racking her brain to think of who, of her father's old and stodgy acquaintances, could possibly want anything to do with her.

"His name is Caledon Hockley."