The Butterfly Bracelets

The story begins in Paris in 1927, when wealthy diamond merchant Salomon Rosman asks master jeweler Max Besner to create a special gift for his wife, Hélène, following the birth of their twins, Daniel and Ruth. Max designs two diamond butterfly bracelets that interlock, creating a single piece when placed together. They become a symbol of the Rosman family—one that will eventually connect several lives across decades.

By 1942, Paris is under Nazi occupation, and the Rosmans are in terrible danger because they are Jewish. Their family is arrested by Sturmbannführer Gustav Möckel, a brutal German officer who steals the valuable bracelets before the Rosmans are deported.

The bracelets disappear, but their story is far from over.

Colette Learns the Family Business

At the same time, teenage Colette Marceau is growing up with her younger sister, Liliane, and their parents, Annabel and Roger Marceau. Annabel is British-born, fearless, and secretly involved with the French Resistance. She is also an accomplished thief.

The Marceau family has a tradition of what Annabel considers ethical theft: stealing from people who have acquired wealth through cruelty or injustice and using the proceeds to help those who need it. Annabel begins teaching Colette the same skills.

Roger is much less comfortable with the risks his wife and daughter are taking. He wants to protect his family and fears Annabel’s Resistance activities will eventually bring the Germans to their door.

Annabel works with an underground network led by Docteur Robillard, known as Le Paon, helping finance Resistance operations through the valuables she steals. Colette becomes involved as well. After stealing a bangle from Nazi collaborator Madame Virlogeux, she meets a Jewish teenage boy who calls himself Tristan. He helps her hide the stolen jewelry behind a loose brick in a neighborhood wall.

The hiding place becomes their secret place. Colette and Tristan begin leaving messages for each other there, and their secret friendship gradually turns romantic. Neither realizes how little time they have.

The Roundup Changes Everything

During the mass arrests surrounding the Vélodrome d’Hiver roundup, Colette witnesses the Rosman family being taken away. Hélène Rosman, desperate to preserve at least something belonging to her family, manages to pass an emerald ring to Annabel before she is deported.

Annabel refuses to let Möckel profit from what he has stolen. She discovers that the Rosman butterfly bracelets have ended up with his mistress, Octavie Duplessis, and Annabel steals them back.

But possessing such recognizable jewels is incredibly dangerous. Annabel divides the bracelets and secretly sews them into the nightgowns belonging to Colette and four-year-old Liliane, hoping the girls can keep them safe until the war ends.

Soon afterward, the Gestapo raids the Marceau home.

Annabel is arrested and taken away. Möckel’s men torture and beat her so severely that she eventually dies from her injuries. During the raid, Colette also sees a man in a dark uniform take Liliane through a bedroom window.

Afterward, the building’s concierge, Madame Nadaud, tells the devastated family that Liliane’s body has been found in the Seine.

Colette believes her mother and little sister are both dead.

Her father is destroyed by the losses. Rather than bringing him and Colette closer, grief makes Roger increasingly bitter and distant, and he eventually abandons his daughter. Colette spends the rest of the war sheltered by family friends Uncle Frédéric and Aunt Marie, before eventually going to England to live with Uncle Leo.

Her relationship with Tristan disappears along with the rest of her old life. Colette assumes that he, too, has been killed.

Colette Becomes a Thief Again

More than seventy years later, in 2018, eighty-nine-year-old Colette lives in Boston. Outwardly, she appears to be an ordinary elderly woman who volunteers at the Boston Center for Holocaust Education. In reality, she has continued the tradition Annabel taught her.

Colette is still a thief.

With help from her longtime friend and fence, Marty Weaver, she targets people she believes have benefited from hatred, corruption, or injustice, sells what she steals, and quietly directs the money toward worthy causes.

One of her latest targets is Linda Clyborn, a wealthy neo-Nazi sympathizer. Colette steals Clyborn’s valuable yellow diamond ring and uses the proceeds to benefit the Holocaust education center.

The theft attracts the attention of Detective Aldo Damien, but Colette knows exactly how people see an eighty-nine-year-old woman. When Damien questions her, she plays into his assumptions, pretending to be confused and senile until he dismisses her as harmless.

Colette’s surrogate daughter and protégée, attorney Aviva Haskell, is not nearly so easy to fool. Aviva has become suspicious of Colette’s secretive behavior and begins realizing that the elderly woman she loves has a much more complicated life than she has admitted.

Then Marty discovers something that makes Colette’s past impossible to ignore.

The Missing Butterfly Appears

While looking through a magazine from the Boston Diamond Museum, Marty spots a piece of jewelry Colette never expected to see again: the matching half of the Rosman butterfly bracelet.

Aviva begins investigating the bracelet and becomes acquainted with the museum’s director, Lucas O’Mara. The attraction between them grows as they work together to trace the jewelry’s history.

The bracelet apparently came through Lucas’s late wife, Vanessa Verdier O’Mara, and her family. It belonged to Vanessa’s grandfather, Hubert Verdier.

Colette and Marty visit Hubert, who is living in a memory-care facility, hoping to discover how he obtained a bracelet stolen during the Nazi occupation. Hubert clearly knows more than he is saying, but before he can fully explain himself, he suffers a fatal heart attack.

For a moment, it seems as though the truth has died with him.

Then another survivor comes forward.

Tristan Returns After Seventy-Six Years

Daniel Rosman, now ninety-one and living in America, survived Auschwitz. After seeing Aviva’s article about the butterfly bracelet, he contacts the Holocaust center.

When Daniel meets Colette, decades of confusion finally begin to unravel. He and Colette knew each other as teenagers in Paris, but she knew him only by his chosen name: Tristan.

The boy Colette loved during the war was Daniel Rosman.

Both had spent most of their lives believing the other was dead. Their separation was not simply the result of war. Madame Nadaud had deliberately given them false information, helping convince each that the other had disappeared forever.

Colette travels to Paris, where she and the others continue investigating the bracelets. André Besner, the great-nephew of Max Besner, helps them obtain documents establishing the jewelry’s history and provenance.

While visiting her old neighborhood, Colette checks the loose brick where she and Tristan once hid jewelry and exchanged messages. Inside, she discovers a note Daniel left for her in 1952.

He came back.

Years after the war, Daniel had returned to the place they once shared and left a message hoping Colette might someday find it. She never did—until more than sixty years later.

Their reunion gives Colette back one person she believed the war had taken from her. But the greatest shock is still coming.

What Really Happened to Liliane

At Hubert Verdier’s funeral, Colette sees Lucas’s elderly grandfather, Bill Carpenter, and recognizes him.

His real name is Guillaume Charpentier.

He is the man Colette saw taking Liliane through the window during the Gestapo raid in 1942.

Guillaume finally tells the truth. He and his wife, Francine, had suffered repeated miscarriages and infant losses and desperately wanted a child. During the raid, Guillaume took four-year-old Liliane. He tells himself that he rescued her from the Gestapo, but instead of returning her to her surviving family, he kept her.

Guillaume and Francine raised Liliane as their own daughter under a new name: Anne Carpenter.

They allowed Colette and Roger to believe Liliane had died. The story about her body being recovered from the Seine was false.

The butterfly bracelet hidden inside Liliane’s nightgown also stayed with Guillaume. He eventually used it to bribe Hubert Verdier, securing the help he needed to escape Europe and build a new life in America with Francine and the stolen child.

Now, after seventy-six years, Guillaume reveals the one thing Colette never imagined she would hear.

Liliane is still alive.

Colette Gets Her Sister Back

Colette travels to Vermont to meet the woman she has mourned since childhood. Liliane Marceau, now known as Anne Carpenter, has spent almost her entire life unaware of the truth about how she came to be raised by Guillaume and Francine.

When the sisters meet, the decades between them fall away through an intimate memory from childhood: the bird calls their family once used with each other. The familiar sounds confirm what documents and confessions already have.

Colette has finally found her little sister.

The revelation also transforms Lucas’s understanding of his own family. Liliane is his mother, making Colette his aunt and connecting him directly to the history he and Aviva have been investigating. Lucas’s daughter, Millie O’Mara, becomes part of the extended family Colette thought she had lost forever.

Guillaume dies two weeks after confessing what he did, having finally revealed the secret he carried for most of his life.

Colette and Daniel Finally Get Their Ending

Colette’s reunion with Liliane is followed by another kind of second chance.

She and Daniel, separated as teenagers by the Holocaust and by the lies of people around them, decide not to waste whatever time they have left. More than seventy years after falling in love as Colette and “Tristan,” they marry in a backyard ceremony surrounded by the family and friends who have become part of their lives.

Aviva and Lucas, whose relationship developed while they investigated the bracelet, have also fallen in love. Colette now has Liliane, Lucas, Millie, Aviva, and Daniel around her—a family created from people whose histories were unknowingly intertwined for generations.

Colette returns Hélène Rosman’s emerald ring to Daniel, restoring one of the last surviving pieces of his mother’s life to the Rosman family.

The butterfly bracelets have also finally completed their long journey. Created in 1927 to symbolize a family’s connection, they were stolen during the Holocaust, separated, hidden, traded, and carried across an ocean before ultimately bringing the surviving members of several families back together.

Colette intends for her half of the bracelet to go to Aviva, passing forward both the jewelry and the complicated legacy that began with her mother.

After spending most of her life believing that the people she loved in wartime Paris were dead, Colette reaches the end of the story with both of them beside her: the little sister stolen from her family and the boy she once knew as Tristan.