Rose o' Paradise

A widower’s mind fractures like antique glass after his wife’s death; the shards are swept up by a half-brother whose smile glints sharper than the asylum key. While the patriarch languishes behind padded walls, his infant daughter is spirited into the limbo of a mammy’s lullabies, her birthright locked away like a moth in a money-box until the hinge of her eighteenth year. Sixteen seasons of dust and whispers later, the father escapes, a gaunt ghost in moonlight, to deposit his blooming Virginia—now a flame of girlhood—into the calloused but gentle palms of Lafe Grandoken, a cobbler who stitches soles and souls alike. Death overtakes the father before sunrise, but the girl’s orbit soon crosses that of Theodore King, a golden-blooded plutocrat whose yacht is a floating Eden. Their courtship is a cascade of parasols and confetti, yet the half-brother, hungering for the long-gestating fortune, hires Maudlin Bates, a hyena in a bowler, to assassinate the lover. Double-crosses ricochet: Bates threatens the cobbler, Morse shoots Bates, Lafe is shackled for the crime, Virginia is gagged and imprisoned in a turret room where sunsets bleed through barred windows. She slips her cage, races the moon to the courthouse, and unfurls truth like a banner; Morse is dragged away in iron, while Virginia and Theodore walk into a horizon stitched with rose-gold thread.