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“Jewel thieves known to operate in this area.”

“Jewel thieves. Oh my.” Well, that would make it easier to deflect attention. “Why, yes, I do believe I saw that young man,” she said, pointing at random to one of the photographs. “Yes, I’m almost certain I did.”

The detective looked relieved. “Thank you, Ms. Marceau. That’s very helpful.” He stood, slid the photos back into the folder, and smiled patronizingly at Colette. “See? That wasn’t so hard, was it?”

“Oh, very easy,” she agreed like the old bat he thought she was. “I do hope you catch the thief. Aviva, would you mind showing the nice detective out?”

“My pleasure,” Aviva said. The detective smiled again at Colette, and then Aviva marched him to the front door, opened it pointedly, and slammed it behind him.

“You didn’t need to be rude,” Colette said when Aviva returned to the living room.

But Aviva didn’t answer. She was staring at Colette like she’d never seen her before. “You took that ring,” she said in awe. It was a statement, not a question.

“That’s ridiculous,” Colette said, looking away.

“Is it? Then look me in the eye and tell me it wasn’t you.”

Colette swallowed hard and returned her gaze to Aviva, but she didn’t say a thing.

“ You took that ring ,” Aviva repeated slowly. “Colette, why would you do such a thing?”

Perhaps this was the universe giving her an opportunity.

“Attorney-client privilege?” she asked, and when Aviva nodded slowly, Colette drew a deep breath and blurted out the words she’d been wanting to say for so long.

“I’ve been a jewel thief since I was a child, as was my mother before me, and her mother before her. ”

Aviva stared at her as if Colette was speaking a language she didn’t understand. “ What? ”

“Come, dear. The chicken is getting cold.” She started back toward the table. “I’ll tell you everything, but I can’t do it without a glass of wine.”

That night, after Aviva had left with a dazed expression, Colette stood at her bathroom sink and stared at her reflection in the mirror.

She had taken off all her makeup in preparation for sleep, and the woman who stared back at her appeared exhausted. Without her armor of lipstick, mascara, and blush, she looked every one of her eighty-nine years, though she hardly felt that age.

Sometimes, she was tempted to rue the way her features had dropped, the way her neck had creased like a fan, the way the years stripped women of the right to be noticed in the world.

But each time she started down that road, she reminded herself that her mother hadn’t grown old at all.

She had died at the age of thirty-six at the hands of the Nazis.

And how could Colette turn her nose up at years her mother hadn’t had the chance to live?

She sighed and turned away from the mirror, flicking off the bathroom light.

“I told her, Mum,” Colette said aloud as she climbed into bed and turned out the light. “I told Aviva the truth, and now I have to wait and see if it changes things between us.”

Colette didn’t speak to her mother often—she was no fool, and she knew that her mother had been dead for seventy-six years.

But on nights like tonight, when she felt the past catching up with the present and forcing her hand, it brought her comfort to speak her thoughts into the silence and to imagine that her mother was out there somewhere, still listening, even after all this time.

“A detective came to the door tonight; I suppose you saw that,” Colette added after a long pause. “Maybe Marty’s right and I should quit while I’m ahead. You were always so much better at this than I.”

The only reply was the same crushing silence that always surrounded her. Sometimes, she wondered if the reason she never felt her mother’s presence was because her mother was still disappointed in her.

The final promise Colette had made to her mother was that she would find Liliane and bring her home.

Colette had failed in this last sacred task, and she had never forgiven herself for it.

Her father hadn’t forgiven her, either. She had spent her entire life trying to atone, but there was no coming back from a sin like that.

She closed her eyes and tried to let sleep take her, but slumber proved just as elusive as forgiveness. Finally, she flicked the light back on, got out of bed, and walked over to the safe tucked into the back of her closet.

She didn’t like to keep pieces in the house, for fear that they could be used against her if the police ever showed up for a raid.

Marty insisted that here in the United States, the police needed probable cause to get a warrant, but his rationalization had fallen upon deaf ears.

Colette knew all too well that the authorities could simply show up and take you away whenever they pleased.

But the small safe in her bedroom closet contained the one thing she couldn’t live without: the diamond-studded bracelet her mother had sewn into the hem of Colette’s nightgown just a few nights before it all ended.

It was half of a pair Mum had stolen from a German—the theft that had gotten her arrested.

Mum had sewn the other half into the hem of Liliane’s gown, and it had gone missing forever the night Liliane was taken.

Colette had enlisted Marty’s help years ago in tracking it down, but to her great regret, the piece had never resurfaced.

Colette had become more and more certain over the years that it never would.

For all she knew, it was lying at the bottom of the Seine.

Now, Colette pulled her half out, opened the clasp, and slipped it onto her narrow wrist. To anyone who hadn’t seen the matching bracelet, the one she wore now looked like two lilies swaying in the breeze.

Four golden veins ran through each flower, each made of a constellation of flawless colorless diamonds set on a gold filigree web and tipped with tiny black diamonds.

Colette’s half alone was worth hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Together, the bracelets, which came together to form a butterfly, would be worth nearly a million.

Colette knew that her mother had never intended to keep the bracelets.

She normally sold her stolen pieces to finance the French Resistance, but this set had had special meaning; she had taken them because they’d been stolen from her friend, a woman named Hélène Rosman.

“One day,” her mother had said, “I will return the bracelets to Madame Rosman. In the meantime, you and Liliane will each keep half, just in case. If the worst comes to pass, having the bracelets to bargain with will keep you safe.”

But the bracelets hadn’t kept them safe at all.

And now, the single bejeweled wing that sparkled in the dim bedroom light on Colette’s age-speckled wrist was all that remained of Colette’s mother and sister, who had lost their lives so many years before.