Thirty Years of Ash

Thirty years ago, a young woman's private photographs were put up for auction, and a privileged heiress bid on them for sport while the room laughed. The young woman drowned herself in the river, still gripping the seventy thousand dollars she had saved through three years of college. The pictures sold for seventy thousand and one.

Now a property developer named Daphne Sutter sits in an auction room and hears a spoiled young woman on her phone, begging her mother to buy back photographs taken without her knowledge. The older voice on the line is certain it can pay any price. Daphne raises her hand and declares she will outbid them all, whatever the cost.

The girl is Camille Aldrich, and her father Sebastian Aldrich steers a family with decades of political power behind it. Daphne's business partner Warren Pike warns her to back down, and Sebastian himself offers her a development permit for Harborstrand to walk away. Daphne refuses, and the bidding floor becomes the ground on which she finally answers a debt thirty years old.