The bullet entered my back at 11 PM on a Tuesday and exited through my chest, taking half my lung with it. I remember the cold pavement against my cheek, the smell of rain on asphalt, and the sound of my own blood hitting the ground.

When I opened my eyes, I was in a dark alley and a voice was telling me it was 1937.

Ten years. I had fallen ten years into the past.

The detective agency on Sunset Boulevard was exactly as I had imagined it would be—small, dusty, and smelling of stale coffee and cheaper cigarettes. I was twenty-eight years old and I remembered being thirty-eight. I knew everything about the next decade—where the wars would happen, who would win, what the world would look like.

And knowing made me worthless.

The Seven Sisters operated out of a speakeasy on 4th Street. They were information brokers, each one specializing in a different aspect of Los Angeles underground—police, politics, prostitution, gambling, union corruption. They were also, I learned, the women who had raised me after my parents died.

Seven women who were not my aunts but were everything like them.

Frank, said Big Marge, pouring me a glass of bootleg whiskey, you look like you've seen a ghost.

I had. I had seen my own ghost, reflected in the mirror of a pharmacy window, and it had taken me three days to recognize myself.

I planted a cactus on the windowsill of my office. It was a small thing, spiny and green and completely indifferent to my suffering. I watered it once a week and watched it grow, slow and steady, in the harsh Los Angeles sun.

As I tended to the cactus, I thought about the future. I knew which stocks would crash, which businesses would flourish, which men would rise and which would fall. I knew everything, and knowing nothing mattered.

The case that brought me into conflict with Big Tony Stone was supposed to be simple—a missing heir, a disputed will, a family fighting over money. But as I dug deeper, I realized the missing heir was a fiction, the will was forged, and the family was a front for Stone's gambling operation.

Tony Stone controlled Los Angeles like a spider controls a web. Police, politicians, journalists—all of them were threads in his web, and he knew how to pull them.

Marry my daughter, he told me over dinner at a restaurant that served real coffee and real food. Sapphire's a good girl. She'll make you happy.

Sapphire Stone was beautiful in the way that broken things are beautiful—fragile, sharp, dangerous. She had dark eyes and a mouth that smiled too much and hands that never stopped moving.

Why me? I asked.

Tony smiled. Because you know things, Frank. Things that could be useful to my family.

I knew then what he wanted. He knew I was different—knew I remembered things I shouldn't, knew I had access to information that shouldn't exist. He wanted to control me through marriage, to bind me to his family and my knowledge to his empire.

The betrayal came from the most unexpected place—Little Lulu, the youngest of the Seven Sisters. She had been feeding information to Tony for years, playing both sides, building her own empire from the scraps of everyone else's.

You're a fool, Frank, she said, not unkindly. You think you can fight Tony? You can't. Nobody fights Tony.

I knew she was right. I had seen it happen in my first life—men who tried to stand up to Tony Stone ended up dead or in prison or worse, alive and broken.

On a rainy night in November 1947, I stood on the pier and watched the rain hit the water. The cactus was back in my office, alive and spiny and indifferent. I had left it there because some things are worth caring about, even when they can't care back.

I walked toward Tony Stone's yacht, alone, with nothing but the coat on my back and the knowledge that I was about to die. But as I walked, I thought about the cactus—small, green, and thriving in conditions that should have killed it.

Maybe that's all any of us can do. Survive. Thrive. In conditions that should have killed us.

The rain fell harder. The yacht loomed ahead, dark and imposing against the night sky. I didn't know if I would live or die. I didn't know if any of it mattered.

But I knew one thing for certain.

Tomorrow, I would water the cactus.