Growing up in a magnificent Charleston home, Jessie Rowland wants for nothing. Her rich, indulgent father has filled her room with expensive toys, but her frantically over-protective mother keeps her from having friends and never lets her out of her sight. As she grows into adulthood, her family's stifling possessiveness feeds her feelings of loss and isolation and fuels terrible nightmares from which she wakes screaming, night after night. At nineteen, she makes her escape to Washington, D. C., where no one knows her and where, as assistant to a prominent Texas senator, she is soon swept into a whirlwind marriage to his handsome son. But as the Senator's career collapses in scandal, her marriage turns ugly and abusive, triggering again her strange dreams of lost happiness.
