Pictures of the Heart

Addie Bryant is haunted by her past of heartbreak and betrayal. After her beau, Isaac Hanson, left the Yukon, she made a vow to wait for him. When she's sold to a brothel owner after the death of her father, Addie manages to escape with the hope that she can forever hide her past and the belief that she will never have the future she's always dreamed of. Years later, Addie has found peace in her new life as a photographer, training Camera Girls to operate and sell the Brownie camera. But during the Alaska-Yukon-Pacific Expo in Seattle, Addie is reunited with Isaac.

While taking photographs at an exposition in Seattle in 1909, Camera Girl Eleanor Bennet snaps an image of a woman in widow's clothes with deep sorrow etched in her expression and a young infant in her arms. Eleanor longs to study botany at the University of Washington and soon becomes fast friends with botanist Bill Reed, but she can't stop thinking about the widow in the photograph. She is stunned to learn Bill recognizes the woman as the sister-in-law he believed lost in a shipwreck.

Budding artist May Parker is captivated by the Japanese exhibits at the Alaska-Yukon-Pacific Exposition and longs to know more about her mother's heritage—which her mother refuses to speak of because of the heartache she left behind in Japan. Wanting to experience more of the exhibits, May works as a Camera Girl—but her curiosity leads her into danger when a suit of samurai armor becomes the target of an elusive art forger.