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“But it’s yours. I insist. My mother stole it so that she could give it back to your family, and I think she’d be very glad that her wish is finally coming to pass, albeit many years too late.”

Daniel hesitated, but after a long pause, he nodded, tears in his eyes. “In that case, thank you, Colette.”

She smiled weakly and reached again for the clasp, sliding the constellation of jewels from her wrist.

Tentatively, he accepted the bracelet, staring at it for a long time before folding his palm around it. He looked up at her. “Now, do we have any idea where the half in the museum came from?”

“I think we’ve found the man who took it,” Colette said, already missing the bracelet but knowing she’d done what her mother would have wanted her to do.

“Who may well have taken my sister. Now I just have to get him to remember the past.” To his look of confusion, she clarified.

“He’s in an assisted-living facility about a half hour outside Boston.

Aviva and I, along with our friend Marty, went to speak with him a few days ago, but he wasn’t very lucid.

I’m not sure if I’m setting myself up for failure, but I’d like to try again. ”

“Well, then.” He stood and held out his arm. “Shall we?”

She looked up at him, confused.

“Let’s go remind him.” He looked once again into her eyes, as if he was searching for something. “Let’s go find out the truth.”

The drive to the facility where Hubert Verdier lived was quiet, but the silence that fell over Colette and Daniel as she drove was comfortable.

Colette couldn’t remember the last time she hadn’t felt the need to fill the space with words, even when she was with Aviva or Marty.

But there was something about Daniel—perhaps their shared backgrounds as children of long-dead parents, immigrants from France, survivors of a war—that made her feel as if she’d known him forever.

Still, as they approached the facility, she found herself wanting to explain something. “You may as well know that the article in the newsletter was part of Aviva’s cover. When she went to the museum asking about the bracelet, she had to tell the museum director something.”

Daniel chuckled. “And then he would have grown suspicious if she never wrote about it.”

“Perhaps not the best-laid plan. Nor was my plan to barge in on Hubert Verdier and accuse him of murder.” She cleared her throat. “I know you don’t know me very well, but I’d like you to know that I’m not the type of woman who ordinarily goes around accosting old men.”

“Who could blame you, Colette? After all this time, to be face-to-face with the man who may have taken something so precious from you? I can’t say I wouldn’t do the same.” He smiled slyly at her. “In fact, I can’t promise I won’t do the same right alongside you in just a few minutes.”

“But you can’t, you see. You must let him believe that we’re both friends of his. Coming at him aggressively before only made him shut down. If he believes he knows us, that we’re on his side, perhaps he’ll come clean.”

“Or perhaps, Colette, he has managed to erase the past entirely.” She could feel his eyes on her as he continued.

“My sister had dementia; the doctors said that her time in Auschwitz had likely hastened the disease’s onset, because she was only in her sixties when she was diagnosed.

There was a period when all she could talk about was the horrors of the past. And then, the past was gone for her, too, like a vanishing act, up in smoke. ”

“That must have been very difficult for you.”

“It was. It was a feeling of losing her slowly, by inches. And then all at once, she was gone. It leaves one with a question: Is the past as you remember it if you’re the only one left with the memories?”

Colette’s heart lurched; she often wondered the same, much like the old riddle about the tree falling in the forest with no one around to hear.

If you’d sustained great tragedy, but all those who’d been with you were now dead, did your recollections become less valid?

Less real? “You and I have both had to carry our memories alone for a great while. We are fortunate to have lived so long, I think, but there’s a particular curse to surviving with one’s memory entirely intact, isn’t there? ”

They slipped into an easy silence once more, and Colette didn’t speak again until she’d taken the exit to Braintree. “Do you ever wonder how different the world would have been if the people we loved hadn’t been taken from us?”

“Even a single death changes the world forever. And in the Second World War, it was millions. The thought is staggering.” He paused.

“I do think often about how different my own life would have been. My sister and I had to fend for ourselves after the war. We had to wrestle with grief we couldn’t process.

And the guilt of living while they died, it never really leaves you, does it? ”

“No, it doesn’t.” Colette pulled the car into the parking lot of the assisted-living facility and cut the ignition. They both sat for a moment without moving. “I think I’ve wasted a great many years not knowing how to move on. How to forgive myself for surviving.” She felt suddenly choked up.

“I feel just the same.” He reached over and folded a hand over hers.

“But it’s not the end of the road for us yet, Colette.

And being here with you reminds me that as isolated as we might feel, perhaps we’re not so alone after all.

” He paused and drew his hand back. “Now, shall we see what we can find out?”

“Are you certain you want to be a part of this?”

“It is part of the story of the bracelet,” he said, reaching for the door handle, “and that means it is my story, too.”