The first time Julian Ashworth saw the future, he was twenty-two years old and standing in a trench outside Verdun.

It was not a vision in any religious sense. There were no angels, no golden light, no voice from above. It was simply that the shell that fell three seconds after his companion Pierre ducked into the crater — the shell that Pierre had survived — landed exactly where Julian knew it would land, as if time had shown him a frame of film a few seconds ahead of the projector.

Pierre survived. Julian did not feel like a hero. He felt like a man who had been shown something he could not unsee.

Three years later, Julian stood on the lawn of his family's Long Island estate, watching the sun set over Long Island Sound, and tried to decide what to do with the rest of his life. The estate was enormous — forty rooms, a garden designed by Olmsted, a stable full of horses that had not been ridden in two years. The Ashworth fortune, built on steel and shipping, had grown larger during the war. Julian's father, Admiral Ashworth, was a national hero. Julian's younger brother Robert had been deaf in one ear from a shrapnel wound. Julian himself carried a map of the future in his head, a map that showed him economic crashes and political disasters and wars that had not yet been born.

He could have been the richest man in America. He could have bought newspapers and influenced elections and built an empire of steel and oil that would have made his father proud. The knowledge alone — the knowledge of which stocks would rise, which presidents would fall, which crises were coming — was worth billions.

Instead, Julian did something that his family considered insane.

He sold the estate.

"The boy has gone mad," his father said, and the Admiral was not a man who wasted words on mild descriptions. "He has seen the war and it has broken his mind."

Julian did not argue. He packed two suitcases, left Robert a letter explaining as best he could what he was doing, and took a train to New York.

The second act of Julian's new life began in a small office on Broadway, rented with the proceeds from the estate sale. He hired a clerk — a young woman named Eleanor who had worked as a typist during the war and was tired of men who had never seen combat taking credit for her calculations. Together, they began the work Julian had come to New York to do: warning people.

Not with prophecies. Julian was not a mystic. He used data — economic indicators, political analysis, international trade flows — combined with the strange intuitive certainty that lived in his chest, a certainty that told him, with the same confidence that told a man rain was coming, that the stock market would crash in 1929, that the rise of a particular politician in Germany was not a passing phenomenon, that another war was coming, and that it would be worse than the last.

"People are not ready to hear this," Eleanor said one evening in October 1929, as they sat in the office surrounded by charts and newspaper clippings. The market had been rising for months, a steady climb that made everyone feel like geniuses. Julian's warnings had been ignored, then ridiculed, then ignored again.

"They will be ready," Julian said. "When the bell rings, they will be ready."

The bell rang on Black Tuesday.

Julian had moved his investments into gold and government bonds six months earlier. He had shorted stocks through a network of contacts he had built during the war, men who trusted him because he had never asked them to bet on anything that didn't make sense. When the market collapsed, Julian's small firm was one of the few that emerged unscathed.

But Julian did not celebrate. He watched men — men who had trusted him, men who had listened to his warnings and then stopped listening because it was easier not to — lose everything. He watched his country tear itself apart in a panic that had nothing to do with economics and everything to do with fear.

The third act of Julian's story took him across the ocean.

In Geneva, he found Henry Blackwood — a British aristocrat who had spent the war as a diplomat and emerged convinced that the Versailles Treaty was a catastrophe waiting to happen. Henry had been reading Julian's published essays on international trade and economic cooperation. He wrote a letter that began: Mr. Ashworth, you are either the most visionary man I have ever read about or the most foolish. I believe you are both.

They met at the League of Nations, in a building that smelled of old wood and new desperation. Henry was thirty-five, with the easy confidence of a man who had never been told he could not do something because of his name. Julian was twenty-six, with the haunted look of a man who had seen too much.

They worked together for seven years. Julian provided the economic analysis — his unique ability to see where trade flows were heading, which countries would default, which alliances would hold and which would break. Henry provided the diplomatic skill — the ability to walk into a room full of men who hated each other and find a single sentence that made them listen.

They were not successful, not in the way that success is measured in history books. The League of Nations continued to flounder. The tariff wars escalated. The rise of fascism in Europe accelerated despite their warnings. But in small ways, in the spaces between the big disasters, they made a difference. Julian's economic forecasts helped a handful of countries prepare for the Depression. Henry's behind-the-scenes negotiations prevented three minor conflicts from becoming major ones.

The fourth act arrived in 1940, on a cold evening in London.

Julian sat in a small flat in Bloomsbury, reading the newspapers. The headlines were the same as they had been for months: Germany mobilizes, Poland resists, Britain prepares. Julian had seen this coming — not the exact date, not the exact route of the invasion, but the general shape of it. He had known, with the same certainty that had guided his life for eighteen years, that another war was coming.

Eleanor sat across from him, mending a tear in his coat. She had been with him since the Broadway office, through Geneva and New York and London, through marriages that ended and friendships that deepened into something neither of them had named. She was forty now, and her hair was streaked with grey, and she looked at Julian with an expression he could not quite read.

"Do you know what happens after this?" she asked.

Julian looked at the newspaper. He thought of the map in his head, the one that showed him the future. He had stopped trying to read it five years ago. It was too cruel, knowing exactly what was coming and being unable to stop it.

"No," he said. And for the first time in his life, Julian Ashworth did not know what would happen next.

He thought this was a gift.

Eleanor finished mending the coat and set it aside. Outside, the London air-raid sirens began to wail, a sound that had become the city's nightly lullaby. Julian stood and walked to the window, looking out at the darkened streets.

He had not built an empire. He had not made a fortune. He had not changed the course of history. But somewhere in Europe, a farmer's son who had read Julian's economic forecasts had used them to stockpile grain before the blockade, and that son's family was alive because of it. In Geneva, a diplomat who had heard Julian's warnings had prepared contingency plans that saved a thousand refugees. In New York, a young banker who had listened to Julian and then ignored him had at least remembered the warning and kept a copy of his notes, which he showed his children, who showed their children.

Julian Ashworth had planted seeds in soil he would never see grow. He did not know if anything would come of them. He did not know if the world would be better or worse in the decades to come.

But he had tried. And in a century that had produced two world wars and a depression, trying was something.