Debt of Consciousness

In the rust-belt city of Belmont Ridge, Esther Payne wins a landmark discrimination suit against AmeriLux Automotive only to marry into the white industrialist Croft dynasty. Her ascent is a trap: her husband Sebastian uses a designer neurotoxin to rewrite her memories, aiming to have her declared legally incompetent and absorb her fortune. As Esther battles to retain fragments of her past—a factory floor, a jury’s verdict, her very identity—she learns that the interest on a soul pawned for class transcendence is paid in the currency of self, and the debt is collected even from the innermost chambers of the mind.