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Daniel leafed through the rest of the papers, tearing up once more when he got to the final one, which included his father’s signature, the S in Salomon and the R in Rosman looping large and bold. Finally, he looked up at André Besner. “I can’t thank you enough,” he said.

“I think my great-uncle would have been very happy that his meticulous record-keeping will help reunite you with your family’s treasures.

But I’m very sorry you felt you had to come all this way.

A trip to Paris at your age, sir…” Monsieur Besner trailed off, seemingly embarrassed by what he’d been about to say.

“A trip to Paris at our age,” Daniel said with a smile at Colette, “might be just what the doctor ordered. And I’m glad I came, because it gives me an opportunity to ask if you might do one more thing for me.” He turned to the attorney with his eyebrows raised.

“Certainly,” Monsieur Lécuyer said cautiously.

Daniel glanced once more at Colette, whose hand he was still holding. “I’d like to draw up paperwork passing possession of both bracelets to Colette Marceau once I reclaim the one from the museum.”

Colette drew her hand back in surprise. “Daniel, no, of course not! The bracelets belong to you.”

“And to you,” he said firmly. “All I want is to see them again, together, united. I’m ninety-one years old, Colette, and I have no children. What is an old man like me going to do with two diamond bracelets? It was never about the money. It isn’t for you either. It’s about setting the past right.”

“If I may be so bold,” the attorney said, “what exactly is Madame Marceau’s claim to the bracelets?”

Daniel turned to face him. “Her mother retrieved them from the German officer who stole them, with the hopes of returning them to my mother one day—but the theft resulted in her mother’s arrest and death, and indirectly in the murder of Colette’s sister.”

The attorney looked at Colette in horror. “I’m terribly sorry, madame,” he said, and Monsieur Besner murmured his condolences, too. “But,” the attorney went on, drawing the word out, “am I correct in understanding that her mother was a thief ?” He let the words hang there, uncomfortable and raw.

“Yes,” Daniel said without hesitating. “And were there more people as brave as she, the war might well have ended sooner.”

Monsieur Besner and his attorney exchanged looks.

“Are you certain, sir, that your father would have wanted the bracelets to go to the daughter of a woman who stole the bracelets? Perhaps he would prefer that they stay within your family.” They were looking at him now like he was a misguided old man.

How easily people slipped into seeing only a person’s age when things became complicated.

Colette wanted to stand up, to cry out that she hadn’t come here for this, that she was as surprised as they were by his offer.

But she was rendered mute by the way they were looking at her now, too, as if she was here to swindle a man out of his fortune.

“I don’t really—” she started to say when she finally found her words, but she was interrupted by Daniel, whose tone had turned steely.

“I believe, sir,” he said coldly, a flush spreading up from the base of his neck, “that my father would understand, as do I, that these bracelets were always meant to find a home with someone who cared as deeply about them as my family did. To be again in their presence is enough for me, and perhaps that is because I have come to peace with the past. Colette has been denied that opportunity.”

He reached for her hand again, and she was too shocked to pull away. “You don’t need to do this,” she said. “This was never my intention.”

“I know,” he replied, smiling at her. “And that is why it is exactly the right thing to do.”

An hour later, after eliciting a promise from Monsieur Lécuyer that he would draw up the transfer paperwork and have it sent to Daniel’s attorney in New York, they said their goodbyes, and Daniel hugged Monsieur Besner tightly and thanked him once again for his help.

They left with Max Besner’s paperwork tucked safely into a manila envelope in the inner pocket of Daniel’s coat.

Their hired car was waiting, and after they’d gotten in and pulled away from the curb, headed for their hotel, Colette spoke. “Daniel, giving me the bracelets is too much.”

“Colette, what good are they to me? I meant what I said. My mother would be very pleased for them to wind up with you.”

She looked at her hands. “It isn’t as if I have anyone to pass them on to either.”

“You have Aviva,” he said quietly.

She looked up. “I do love her as if she was my own, you know.”

He smiled. “And that makes her your family.”

“I have felt that way since the day she came home with me after her mother’s death,” Colette replied.

“But sometimes I think that my mother would have been very disappointed that I didn’t have children.

For hundreds of years, the generations that came before me produced heirs to carry on the family tradition, and now, because of my own choices, that line dies with me. ”

“Colette,” Daniel said gently, “I suspect that knowing you lived—a long and beautiful life—would have been everything your mother needed.”

Colette didn’t say anything.

“If it’s not too personal to ask, why did you never marry?” he asked after a moment.

She looked up at him. The question should have stung, but the gentleness of his tone softened the words and made her want to be honest. “I would have liked to, I think. But I feared that marriage would come with an obligation to have children, and when I was young, I felt that if I couldn’t protect my own sister, I shouldn’t have a child of my own.

I’d failed her, and I was terrified of failing again. ”

“Oh, Colette,” Daniel said, reaching for her hand.

“And then later, when the moment for having a child had passed, it was simply that there was no one I felt strongly enough about to fall in love with.” She glanced at him and then looked quickly away. “How about you? You married, didn’t you?”

“Yes, just a few years after coming back from the camps. Paulette. We were married until her death. She was only forty-nine; it’s been nearly forty years now since I lost her.”

“I’m very sorry. And you didn’t have children?”

“No.” He seemed to search for a moment for words.

“My parents were very much in love. I remember the way my mother looked at my father, the way he gazed at her like he couldn’t believe his luck.

They used to put records on the old gramophone and dance together in the kitchen.

They were the best of friends, you see. When I was a boy, I dreamed of having that one day.

But that was not what I had with Paulette.

I loved her, and I know she loved me. But when we married, it was not about finding the kind of perfect match that my parents had.

It was about desperately trying to find a home in the world after it had all fallen apart. ”

Colette looked out the window at Paris rolling by. She remembered so clearly what it felt like in the years after her mother’s death when she was living with Uncle Frédéric and Aunt Marie and felt as if she belonged nowhere. “I understand that.”

“We both wanted children, at first,” he continued.

“But when Paulette had difficulty conceiving, we both decided that perhaps bringing a child into a family soldered together by grief rather than love would be a mistake. We stopped trying, and it was likely a moot point anyhow. In any case, we were very happy living together as companions and dear friends for many years.”

“I’m sorry you lost her at such a young age,” Colette said.

“When one has lived as long as we have, the sea of loss is nearly too great to fathom.”

Colette nodded. They rode in silence for a moment, and then she asked, “Do you regret not having children?”

“I do,” he said. “It felt like the right decision at the time, but like you, I now feel my family tree dying with me. I worry that in allowing that to happen, I’ve let my parents down.”

“Daniel, I suspect that knowing you lived—and a long and beautiful life at that—would have been everything your parents needed.”

Daniel smiled at his own words being parroted back to him. “Indeed. I think that in the end, my parents, and yours, would have wanted most of all for us to be happy.”

As the car slowed to a stop in front of their hotel, Les Jardins du Marais, Colette realized with a jolt of sadness that they were in the eleventh arrondissement, mere blocks from where she had once lived.

Her heart thudded as she and Daniel climbed out of the back seat.

She breathed in, Paris itself assaulting all her senses at once.

Yeast, smoke, flowers, exhaust, eternal spring.

How was it possible that the air itself felt like home, like a reunion long overdue?

While Daniel paid the driver and retrieved their luggage from the trunk, Colette turned in a slow circle, taking in her surroundings.

Everything had changed, of course, but she knew this street, the narrow rue Amelot.

Before the war, Colette, Liliane, and their parents had frequented a café on the corner that was no longer there, and she was certain there had been a bookstore in exactly the spot where they were standing now.

“Daniel,” she said as the car pulled away and he came to her side holding the bags. “I know this place. My family used to live very close to here.”

He smiled. “I thought that might be the case. Mine did, too. I believe that’s how our mothers wound up involved with the same Resistance group; the man who led it was from the neighborhood, and I always assumed that most of the group’s members were, too.”

“Le Paon,” Colette murmured. She hadn’t thought of the man in years; he had survived the war, but she’d lost track of him after 1945.