I mentioned Theo in conversations with Janus often, to make sure he understood that my husband still lived in my heart. “Before Holst, I thought I would walk the polder along Trekweg Road, by the old canal. Do you know how I could reach it from here?”

“I can show you. After the train, I wouldn’t mind some sea air.” Janus held out a hand. “May I?”

I let him take my bag, and thanked him for his assistance. My wrist ached from scrubbing the floors the day before, and the heavy bag was doing the sore ligaments no favors. A family of five had moved in, a lot of work, but I was earning sufficient income at last.

Janus and I talked about the family and the work that needed to be done at the villa, until we reached the sea.

“It’s nice to have sunny days like this in October.” I barely needed my wool shawl. “The Americans call it Indian Summer.” I’d learned that from Frederik van Eeden when I had last visited him and Martha to borrow a new batch of books from their library.

“My Catholic grandmother used to call it St. Luke’s Little Summer,” Janus said as we passed a couple of seagulls fighting over an empty crab shell. “Why Trekweg Road?”

“When Theo was fifteen, he came here with Vincent.” I couldn’t visit the polder with my beloved, but I could walk with the ghost of his memories. “After Vincent dropped out of school, their uncle helped him into a job in The Hague. Theo told me they walked here, in the rain. Somewhere here on the polder, they swore to support each other always.”

Vincent had taken Theo outside the city, to this land made by human hands, reclaimed from the sea with dikes and dams and draining—a perpetual task, for the sea would always fight to claim it back. Land in constant danger.

“Sometimes I think Vincent was Theo’s polder. Theo tried to reclaim him over and over from malaise and dissatisfaction and even madness, always hoping to restore Vincent to happiness.”

Yet, at the end, Theo hadn’t been able to reclaim his brother. And the bullet that killed Vincent killed Theo too. This I knew for certain.

And now here I am, fighting to reclaim both men from a world that would too easily forget them. This was my atonement.

I breathed the air Theo and Vincent had breathed. I walked the very ground. I let the mud stick to my boots, because the same mud had stuck to theirs.

Janus walked beside me, a quiet companion. He didn’t seek my attention. He was content to allow me to feel what I had come here to feel.

We walked to the nearest windmill that spun tirelessly, pumping water. Vincent had reminisced to Theo about it in one of his letters.

My throat burned. “They used to sell milk and fried eels.”