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As the canary diamond across the room caught the light, Colette Marceau’s fingertips itched, just as they always did before a score.

Patience , she reminded herself. Steady, girl .

She was nearly ninety, for goodness’ sake, too old for this, too wise.

But age brought with it some advantages.

Yes, it would be harder to make a fast getaway with a bad back, and the arthritis that had begun to stiffen her fingers as the decades passed made it more difficult to undo complicated clasps.

But should she ever be caught, claiming senility would be an easy defense.

After all, perhaps she hadn’t known what she was doing when she slipped a Rolex from a man’s wrist or relieved a woman of her diamond studs.

There was a smattering of applause from the hundred or so attendees, all orchestra donors dressed to the nines, most clutching wineglasses that made it difficult to clap.

As a result, Linda Clyborn’s walk to the podium felt oddly subdued.

She teetered a bit on heels too narrow to balance her wide hips, and her hair was an unflattering shade of blond, though she surely had access to the best colorists in Boston.

These were things Colette noticed without trying to, the way that even the wealthiest people often didn’t quite fit into the social circles they aspired to.

Those who came from old money were born into the ways of moving and dressing and speaking that came with family inheritance.

Those who had worked hard and found success were often quiet and humble.

But those who had clambered their way into wealth often lacked polish, the way an uncut diamond lacked shine.

“Thank you, my friends,” Linda said, slurring the s ever so slightly. Colette could feel the corners of her lips twitching. The more the woman drank, the easier it would be to slip the pale yellow diamond from her finger.

Rings were tricky. In fact, though Colette had been relieving unpleasant people of their jewels since she was ten years old, she hadn’t become truly comfortable with rings until she was nearly thirty.

Bracelets were easy; she could unhook a clasp with a firm but gentle lift of her thumb as she brushed against an unsuspecting donor.

Necklaces, too, often fell easily with a graceful move Colette had come to think of as a syncopated chassé; she could unfasten the most complicated closures with a flick of her right wrist just as she turned and brushed against the person, apologizing with her eyes downcast in feigned embarrassment as she let the jewels tumble into her left hand.

Men’s watches were the easiest of all; the fold-over clasp of a Patek Philippe was no more challenging than the ardillon buckle of a Piaget, though it had taken her countless hours of training to release both without directly touching the wrist of the wearer.

Rings, however, were a different story. It was feasible to steal them only when they were visibly loose, which eliminated a fair number of potential scores.

It was also impossible to steal a ring without a fair amount of physical contact.

The key, therefore, was distraction. Her favorite move for a female mark was to wait until there was a visibly inebriated man, or at the very least a visibly pompous one, in the vicinity.

Colette would reach out and give the mark a sharp pinch in the side with her right hand while grabbing the mark’s hand with her left, pretending to help steady her while expressing indignation.

In the millisecond during which their hands were touching and the mark was distracted, she would reach over with her right hand and slide the ring off, something that had taken Colette years of practice to perfect.

The woman would always be so incensed by the pinch, and so intent on finding the offender, that she wouldn’t feel the ring being slipped off.

Later, when she reported the loss of the jewelry to the police, she would almost inevitably mention the pinch, but never the small-framed woman who had come to her aid before melting back into the crowd.

Most of the time, the marks never saw Colette’s face at all.

Up at the podium, Linda was thanking a laundry list of fellow millionaires for their support.

No one ever thanked the underpaid assistant who kept things running behind the scenes or the third-grade teacher who’d once told them they could be anything they wanted to be.

No one thanked the second-chair bassoonist or the play’s understudy, the stagehands or the ushers.

If a mark ever broke protocol and, for instance, addressed a member of the catering staff with genuine respect, or held a door for a hotel housekeeper, Colette would abort her mission and assume she’d gotten things wrong.

That had never happened, though, because Colette never chose her targets carelessly. No decent person deserved to have their possessions taken. It would go against the code Colette had sworn allegiance to as a little girl.

She had lived her life by that code. Her own mother had died by it.

And now, Linda Clyborn’s number was up. Not only had she maneuvered to block her husband’s three daughters from inheriting anything from his estate after his untimely—and some said suspicious—death at the age of sixty, but she had also been linked definitively to a neo-Nazi group, which she was helping to fund using the proceeds from her late husband’s substantial estate.

Colette had experienced enough Nazis to last a lifetime, thank you very much. Having lived in Occupied France seven and a half decades earlier, she simply had no room for them here in Boston in the year 2018.

“And finally,” Linda Clyborn was saying as Colette continued to slip unnoticed through the crowd, “I’d like to thank all of you here tonight.

Your support has made it possible for the Boston Orchestral Education Consortium to continue providing programs for both our valuable professional musicians and for the children who might one day wish to pursue careers in the arts.

Enjoy the evening, and don’t forget to bid on the silent auction items.”

She waved to the crowd and descended from the stage to another underwhelming round of applause. She greeted the oily Senator Nierling, whom Colette planned to relieve of his own Rolex at some point in the future. But not tonight.

Linda Clyborn teetered through the crowd, shaking hands and kissing cheeks, and when the deejay started playing hits from the 1980s and the crowd began gyrating awkwardly, Colette straightened her wig—an unassuming gray bob with curtain bangs—and commenced her approach.

She glided through the throng until she was a foot away from her target.

A trio of fortysomething men approached from the opposite direction, one of them visibly drunk, sloshing beer from a pint glass as he walked.

Just then, Linda glanced in Colette’s direction, and Colette froze.

If Linda noticed her, she would need to abort the mission for the evening.

But Linda looked right through her, in search of someone more important than a small, modestly dressed octogenarian.

Colette rolled her eyes. To people like Linda Clyborn, the elderly were invisible.

Really, it made scores like this almost too easy.

As Linda shook hands with another woman and set off through the crowd again, Colette made her move.

Just as the trio of men passed, Colette reached out and pinched Linda, simultaneously grasping the woman’s hand, feigning aid while sliding the ring smoothly from the woman’s left middle finger.

She felt it slip into her own palm with a satisfying plunk, all eight-plus carats now liberated.

She quickly closed her hand around the prize and slid it into her pocket as Linda Clyborn whipped around, focusing her rage on the drunkest of the three men, who was stammering a confused apology, unsure what he was being accused of.

As the pitch of the woman’s voice rose, Colette melted backward into the crowd.

Later, when Linda Clyborn discovered that her ring was gone, no one would remember a small, gray-haired woman in a nondescript black cocktail dress, making her way casually toward the exit as her mark’s aggrieved shrieks rose from the dance floor.