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The morning after the theft of Linda Clyborn’s ring, Colette sat at her kitchen table in the Boston suburb of Quincy, admiring the way the pale yellow diamond caught the light, throwing beams across the room in a glittering rainbow.

She never tired of the jewels themselves, the meticulous cuts, the razor-sharp lines, the prisms of color they held within their hearts.

When had Clyborn noticed it missing? Had it been during the cocktail party, or had she been too drunk on her own power to register the lack of weight on her finger?

Had she flashed her hand deliberately to show it off, only to realize it was no longer there?

Had theft been her first guess when she’d realized the ring was gone?

Or did a part of her think that she’d lost it herself?

Colette hoped for the latter; when a person believed she had mislaid her own jewels, she tended to be defensive with the police rather than truly trying to recall every face she’d seen the night before. Not that the woman had registered her existence anyhow.

Colette slid the ring onto her bare left ring finger, where she’d never worn a ring of her own.

She sighed at the perfect fit, the way it looked like it was meant to be there.

If only she could keep a piece here and there, enjoying the jewels for herself, but that would subvert the family tradition, the one her mother and her uncle Leo had raised her to firmly uphold.

By her count, over the nearly eight decades she’d been stealing, interrupted only briefly during the Second World War, she’d funneled well over $30 million in stolen jewels to deserving organizations, a figure that made her heart swell with pride.

Typically, she simply made anonymous contributions to established foundations, but the thing she was proudest of—and the only organization she had funded every single year since its establishment—was the Boston Center for Holocaust Education, which she had anonymously founded herself in 1972 as a way to continue the work she and her mother were doing when her mother’s life was cut brutally short.

No one—not even the center’s founding director, Rachel Haskell, or her daughter, Aviva, who had both become like family to Colette—had any idea that it was Colette who’d provided the seed money for the center; they knew her merely as a dedicated volunteer, one who had helped the organization open a second branch of the center in New York in 1980.

You’re going to do so much good in the world , her mother had said just after Colette had stolen her first piece, and all these years later, Colette still hoped she would be proud.

Colette’s phone buzzed on the table in front of her, jolting her out of her thoughts.

The older she got, the more prone she was to wandering down memory lane.

Her mother and sister had been gone for three-quarters of a century, and yet she could see them both so clearly.

Most nights, she had nightmares of shadowy figures stealing them away, but sometimes, she dreamed vividly of the three of them snuggled together in bed, Mum reading stories to her two daughters.

Colette could still hear the sound of her sweet voice, her round British accent.

She pushed the thoughts away and glanced down at her phone screen. Aviva . The girl, now an attorney in her late thirties and still a volunteer for the center, was like the daughter Colette had never had. She smiled and answered.

“Colette?” Aviva’s voice was hushed and muffled.

“Aviva, I can hardly hear you,” Colette said, pressing the phone to her ear as she cursed the way her hearing had deteriorated with age. The more years one lived, the more indignities one was forced to endure.

“Colette,” Aviva repeated more firmly. “Were you at a gala last night for the Boston Orchestral Education Consortium?”

Colette’s mouth went dry. “Why would you ask that, dear?”

“There was a theft there last night,” Aviva said. “There are a few pictures in the paper today, and there’s a woman in the crowd, just beside the woman whose ring was stolen, and she looks exactly like you, but with a wig.”

“Now why would I go to an orchestra gala, darling?” Colette asked, trying to keep her voice steady, even as she mentally cursed her bad luck.

Obviously, Linda Clyborn had reported the theft immediately, which meant that Colette would need to wait to fence the piece.

It was terribly inconvenient. “What was stolen?” she asked innocently.

“A ring,” Aviva said. Colette could hear the rustling of a newspaper, and she imagined Aviva sitting at her office desk, overlooking Tremont Street and the Boston Common below. “Worth more than one hundred twenty-five thousand dollars, according to the paper.”

Colette guffawed before she could stop herself.

The ring wasn’t worth a penny more than $90,000, though she shouldn’t have been surprised that a person like Mrs. Clyborn would lie about such a thing.

She imagined that the vile woman was already waiting with her hand outstretched for a check from her insurance company.

“You do know, dear, that Linda Clyborn is a neo-Nazi, which is quite a ridiculous thing to be. It’s hard to find much pity for her. ”

Aviva was silent for a second. “How do you know the name of the person the ring was stolen from?”

Colette shook her head at her own carelessness. “I have my paper open, too,” she lied. “I’m reading along with you now.”

“And you don’t think the woman in the picture beneath the headline looks just like you?”

Colette’s newspaper was still on her front doorstep; she hadn’t made it that far yet. “Oh, I can see a passing resemblance.”

“It’s more than passing, Colette. Are you sure you weren’t there?”

Sometimes, the best deflection was to go on the offensive. “Really, dear, if you’re accusing me of something, just come out and say it.”

“No, I’m sorry,” Aviva said right away, sounding embarrassed. “But how do you know that Linda Clyborn is a neo-Nazi, anyhow?”

“You know me, darling,” Colette said. “I like to keep up with the gossip.” Really, what was wrong with her this morning?

Nothing could be farther from the truth, actually, and from Aviva’s noncommittal grunt, it was clear Aviva knew that, too.

“In any case, she isn’t someone I’d waste time feeling concerned about. Not a particularly good human being.”

Aviva was silent for a few seconds. “Why do I have the feeling that you know more about this than you’re letting on?”

Colette forced a tinkling laugh. “Now you’re treating me like a hostile witness.

Forget about it, dear. But since I have you, would you like to come over for dinner tonight?

I’m making your favorite.” Perhaps it was a mistake to invite Aviva over when the younger woman was obviously suspicious.

But Colette felt a sudden loneliness, a sense that the years were slipping away before she’d righted any of the wrongs of the past. Being around Aviva always made her feel a bit more centered, like she had a purpose.

Besides, she needed to change the subject somehow.

“Dijon chicken?”

“Of course.” It was Colette’s specialty, a dish she remembered her mother making before the war, chicken breast cooked in a thyme-laced Dijon cream sauce. “Say, seven o’clock?”

Aviva hesitated before sighing. “You know your chicken is the way to my heart. I’ll be there.”

Colette hung up and then shuffled to her own front door to grab the newspaper that awaited her there.

Flipping to the local section, she stared in disbelief at the photograph below the fold on the front page.

It was indeed a picture of her, as clear as day, as she moved in on Linda Clyborn.

If the photographer had taken it thirty seconds later, he would have caught her in the act.

How had she not realized that there was someone there snapping photos of the crowd?

Her heart thudded as she contemplated just how close she had come to being caught this time.

Her phone rang again, and this time, it was Marty’s name on the caller ID.

“Hey, kid,” he said when she answered, and she smiled at the term of endearment, which should have felt ridiculous at her age, but which warmed her heart just as it had since the first day she’d met him sixty-six years before.

She’d been twenty-four then to Marty’s twenty-six, but he’d made her feel like a schoolgirl.

In a different life, she imagined that they might even have fallen in love.

“Have you seen today’s paper yet?” he asked.

“I have,” she said, glaring at the offending picture once more.

He chuckled. “Am I to assume, then, that you have a delivery for me?” He was being cautious, as he always was, in case there was a tap on either of their lines, but it felt ridiculous at this point; they’d been doing business together for six decades, and neither had ever fallen under suspicion; who was going to suspect an eighty-nine-year-old woman and a ninety-one-year-old man of running a massive jewelry theft and black market resale operation?

“Maybe,” she said. “But only for safekeeping.”

“Only for safekeeping,” Marty agreed immediately. They both knew that the piece would be too hot to move for at least a couple of weeks. “But I’ll reach out to my contacts to begin gauging interest. Could you bring it by in a bit? Are you free for lunch today?”

He knew as well as she did that she was free for lunch nearly every day, unless she was volunteering at the center.

With no relatives other than Aviva—the closest thing to family she had—there was no one to need her.

“I’ll have to check my calendar,” she deadpanned, and Marty laughed, as she knew he would.

“Why don’t you come by at noon?”

“I’ll see you then.” Colette hung up with a smile on her face and snuck one last look at the newspaper before crumpling it up and shoving it straight into the recycling bin.