Some time later, Bill Steiner, the pawn shop owner, asks Rosie out on a date. Rob likes Rosie's voice and offers her a job recording audiobooks. On the street, Rosie is stopped by a man named Rob Lefferts, a customer at the pawn shop, who asks her to read an excerpt from a book. Fascinated, she trades her ring for the painting. In the pawn shop, her attention is drawn to a painting which depicts a woman in a rose madder gown. A few weeks later, Rosie decides to pawn her engagement ring, but finds that the ring's 'diamond' is fake. She quickly makes new friends, including the owner of the shelter, Anna Stevenson, who helps Rosie find a small apartment and a job as a hotel maid. At the bus station, she meets a good-natured man named Peter Slowik, who guides her to a local women's shelter.

Taking Norman's credit card, Rosie departs on a bus to an unfamiliar city in the Midwest, with no clear plan of action. One day, she notices a drop of blood on their bedsheet and realizes that her continued life with Norman could eventually kill her. Nine years later, Rosie still lives with and takes abuse from her husband. The short-tempered Norman has recently been accused of assaulting and raping a black woman named Wendy Yarrow, and the subsequent lawsuit and internal affairs investigation has made him even more volatile. Rosie considers leaving Norman, but dismisses the idea because Norman specializes in finding missing persons. In 1985, police officer Norman Daniels brutally beats his wife Rosie while she is four months pregnant, resulting in a miscarriage. In his memoir, On Writing, King states that Rose Madder and Insomnia are 'stiff, trying-too-hard novels.' It deals with the effects of domestic violence (which King had touched upon before in the novels It, Insomnia, Dolores Claiborne, Needful Things, and many others) and, unusually for a King novel, relies for its fantastic element on Greek mythology. Rose Madder is a horror/ fantasy novel by American writer Stephen King, published in 1995.

King rose madder