“I never told the FBI!” Edie shot back. “Simon did!”
“And we didn’t tell Marcy we were thieves,” Frances said. “We would never.”
“She overheard us,” Joan said. “Because someone here runs her mouth.” She pointed at Frances.
Frances threw up her hands. “I’m sorry already. I had no idea that anyone would be listening! When was the last time anyone listened to you, I ask?” she demanded, looking around at them.
No one said a word.
“My point exactly,” Frances said.
“I just …” Edie sighed to the ceiling. “Marcy is lovely. She’s … she’s wonderful. She’s my favorite,” she said, her eyes suddenly shining with tears. “And she’s far too good for this sort of thing and I don’t want her near it. I don’t want any of my kids near it. They are the best thing that ever happened to me, and I don’t want to fuck it up with my past suddenly showing up.”
“Aww, Edie,” Irene said. “Don’t worry. We’re not recruiting.”
Edie sniffed. “Did you have kids, Irene?”
Irene shook her head. “A rolling stone gathers no moss. I can’t stand kids anyway.” She seemed to realize how that sounded and shifted uneasily. “The little ones, I’m talking. Really little. I mean, your granddaughter seems very nice.”
“Stop talking,” Joan murmured.
“My granddaughter is naïve. What about you, Joan?” Edie asked.
“What about me?” Joan asked. “I was never going to get married, and I didn’t know you could manage to get kids in any way but the standard route until I was too old to have them. I’ve been taking care of my mom the last decade or so. Or she’s taking care of me—I’m not sure. And I’m running a medicinal marijuana farm and learning about mushrooms.”
Edie laughed.
“It’s not a joke,” Joan said. “Unfortunately, my choices in life were not great after everything that happened. Speaking of which … just what happened back then, anyway? You keep saying you didn’t do it. I’ve been waiting all these years to know the truth.”
Edie pulled out a kitchen chair and sat. She looked exhausted.
Joan took a seat next to her. “It’s only fair that we know, Edie. I want to be able to trust you. All I know is that one minute we were planning a big get, and the next, we were running for our lives. I lost half of the money I’d saved just because I was afraid to use my real name to retrieve it.”
“I’m really sorry, Joan,” Edie said. “I have agonized for years about what happened, but what can I say? I made the mistake of falling in love. Frances is right—I wanted better for myself.”
“Better than what, exactly?” Frances asked. “What was wrong with what we had?”
Edie looked at her like she was talking gibberish. “What we had? We didn’t haveanything, Frances. A tenuous existence at best. How long do you think we could have kept it up?”
Frances blinked. “I guess I thought forever,” she muttered. She’d been idealistic, sure, but she could remember assuming they’d be together all their lives.
“Wait a minute, Edie,” Joan said. “You fell in love and committed the cardinal sin of telling our secret? You couldn’t have bowed out of our gang without turning on us?”
“I never turned on you. What happened is that I ran out of time. And for the record, we were made.”
“What? How?” Irene demanded.
“Remember when Simon caught Frances with the Cézanne at the party?”
They all nodded. Frances remembered they’d even laughed about it afterward.
“He started asking questions after that. How did I know you all? Where did we go when we went away for the weekend?” She glanced at the floor and shook her head. “I made things up, but he was suspicious. He hadn’t wanted that party to begin with, and he hadn’t wanted to invite my friends. But I thought … I thought I had soothed it over, and it wasn’t that big of a deal.” She drew an unsteady breath. “Then he found the Pahlavi brooch from the Ramsbury estate heist. And he knew.”
Silence filled the small kitchen.
“The brooch,” Frances repeated. Edie had taken the jewelry haul to their fencer in New York. “But why did you have—”
“They were reporting four women near the estate that night of the Ramsbury heist with a flat tire and … and he figured it out.”
