In my grief, I had forgiven my brother. If any of my siblings had ever understood me, it had always been Dries. His presence made even the bitter cold more bearable. Everything was going to be all right with him by my side. He was going to help me sort out my dire circumstances.

“What should I do?” I would follow his advice. I had to do only that, to stumble forward and follow the lamp he would lift to light my path through the darkness of grief. “How should I manage all those paintings? All of Vincent’s art?”

My toes were going numb, tingling as we parted to let a bundled-up washerwoman pass between us, carrying her overloaded basket and singing. Then she, and the sweet scent of absinthe on her breath, passed, and I could hear only the snow crunching under our boots and the wind whistling over the rooftops.

“Dries?”

He was watching the woman’s muddy footprints in the snow instead of looking at me. “Burn them.”

A squall hit us, coming around the corner, where we turned. We had but walked to the nearest market, a couple of blocks away. Wil had upended my last bottle of milk that morning, startled by Dries’s booming voice upon arrival.

I tucked my wool shawl closer around my sleeping son in my arms. Dries tugged up his collar, unaware that he was breaking my heart.

“Et tu, Brute?” I said the words in quiet shock, but the squall died, and he heard me.

His face was red from the cold. He swung up an equally red hand in frustration. “I am hardly stabbing you in the back, Jo. I am giving you advice, per your request.”

“But you were a friend to Theo and Vincent.”

“We cannot turn back time. We cannot go back. The machine that can fly into the past exists only in fiction.”

“Anacronópete.” I remembered the name from Enrique Gaspar’s book. “If only we had that.”

The frigid wind flung snow at us again and brought tears to my eyes. I walked faster.

“We should have waited for the omnibus or taken a carriage.” Dries kept up. “You must learn to accept the present. Do be reasonable.” He shifted to block some of the wind that had changed direction. “You have to rid yourself of some of your clutter. Your room at home will not be able to hold all you have.”

“I do not fit in my old room.”

I could not return to my old life, for the simple reason that one could not return to the past. I couldn’t go back to playing duets on the piano with my younger sisters and become one of them again. They didn’t yet suspect the true harshness of life, how it could strip off your very skin. I wished not to ruin their blissful blindness.