As a performance artist in the New Orleans Old Quarter, Armelle plays a stone angel frozen to the spot to amuse tourists, but in those vacant minutes, she is anything but still. The past shifts, the margins between centuries blur, and suddenly she is pitched into 18th century New Orleans, accused of treachery by a man she knows died in 1759.
And now her time lapses intensify, impacting her current life. Did she really make an indecent pass at her professor, shove a customer downstairs at the Bourbon Street bar? And where was she the night that customer died, since it was her purse found at the scene?
Armelle desperately needs help but not from physicians or psychiatrists or any modern science. No, she has to convince everyone trained in rational thought that the soul plays by different rules and can transcend place and time.
Adrian, her former professor with whom she is passionately in love, must understand that his rejection is based on a tragic event replaying itself over and over again, that they are tangled in a soul warp and must fight their way free. Only Louise Dupre, her friend's Aunt Loo, can guide them. A phenomenal spirit in her own right, it is she who leads them back to New Orleans in 1756 when a young Acadian convent girl living amid the Ursuline nuns risks her soul to save her city only to discover she's been on the wrong side all along.
As history claws its way into the present, Armelle must track her parallel self back through time and learn to change the future with her heart.