On her elegantly appointed bed Angel was lounging, somewhat less than elegantly, on her back with her head dangling over the edge of the bed, looking at her sister upside down and trying to decide whether Estelle looked like an angel or a corpse in her pearlescent dress. This was the curse of their complexion - though not, of course, of Torie's - that they were to forever looked washed out and ghostly, and by dressing them in white she suspected her mother was making them look less like prospective brides than porcelain dolls that were never to be touched by human hand.

"I hate this," she muttered pointlessly. She hated just about everything to do with society these days. She had tried her best to be a perfect Pendergast Rose, then a charming, assured lady ready to be wed, and now she was rapidly becoming lichen that would soon be scraped away and thrown back to the sea while everyone went on without her.

"And that dress doesn't suit you."

None of this was fair.

---

time of death: when MJ dropped this heart-stopping set