An imaginative girl constructs a tale of incestuous obsession, teenage love, and willful desertion to explain her mother's disappearance. Fifteen-year-old Rose is trying to make sense of her world. Her mother ? a beautiful woman with signature stiletto heels, bright clothes, and the synthetic gleam of a blond wig ? has vanished, and Rose is convinced that she must be in danger. Unable to cope with the possibility of having been abandoned, Rose uses her vivid imagination to construct her own explanation for her mother's sudden disappearance. Her father suspiciously carries on with his life, in no hurry to contact the police. Coupled with Rose's newfound knowledge that he is not actually the ringleader of a circus, she begins to doubt that he is even her real father. As Rose pieces together snippets of remembered conversations and the half-truths she is fed by adults, she creates her own romantic narrative about the disappearance ? one that is as difficult to accept as the truth.