He didn’t like being without me for long. Did my little son remember how his father had disappeared from his life without warning? I told myself he couldn’t possibly. He had been only a year old when Theo had died.

“Mauw. Mauw.” Wil still held the kitten the widow had given him.

He ran around the garden with the cat, investigating every flower and ant, and I hung the rest of the wash on the line between two plum trees, working as quickly as I could manage, impatience driving me back into the kitchen, to those letters.

I carried a laughing Wil and sleepy kitten in the empty basket. “You are so heavy. You are growing too fast.”

I set them down inside the door, and they stayed right there, Wil pretending to be a boat captain and the kitten his crew. I grabbed the correspondence.

Oh, I should have waited. I should have lived longer in that pocket of joyful expectation. My hopes evaporated with the first sentence.

We regretfully inform you… Goupil’s letter began. And the message did not improve the further I read. I sank onto a chair.

Goupil refused to represent Vincent. And if the place where I had the most personal connection wouldn’t help me, then nobody else would either, the dark voice of despair whispered.

The rough sounds of the handsaw died away in the back room, replaced by the soft blows of the rubber mallet. Thump, thump, thump, like a heartbeat, thump, thump, thump.

I wanted to cry, but I could not cry with Janus there.

And not in front of Wil either, although he was half-asleep in the basket.

I opened Matisse’s letter next. I should have thrown it into the fire instead. Tarnation and damn.

I peeled the onions, sunk in my own misery until Anna walked through the door again.

She listened to the thumping in the back room. “He is still here.” Then she said, “I saw the postman hand Mevrouw Ballot some letters while I stopped to chat with the milliner on the corner. Good news?”

“Goupil is sending back the paintings I shipped them, asking me not to send more.”

“I’m so sorry, Jo. And after all Theo did for them. All those years of work and the money they earned off his back.”

Her sympathetic outrage was a balm to my battered soul.

“I also had a letter from Matisse.” I could barely repeat the words. “He has been traveling, retracing Vincent’s steps. They had been friends in Paris. Anyway, he found one of Vincent’s paintings in Arles, the portrait of Dr. Rey. Vincent painted it as payment for the doctor for treating him after his unfortunate ear incident.”

“Oh?”

“Matisse bought the portrait.”

“The doctor didn’t like it?”

My eyelashes trembled with outrage. “Dr. Rey’s mother has been using it to patch a hole in her chicken coop.”

“Oh, Jo.”