As soon as he reached us, he took my still-sleeping son from me. “I have a carriage waiting for us outside the station.”

We bustled through the crowd together. All around us, family members were embracing each other, mothers shouted for their children, porters jostled forward, laden with luggage. Steam engines whistled. I didn’t attempt to talk to Dries over the cacophony of noise.

“You’ve done it, Jo,” he said once we settled into our conveyance. “You must be excited.”

“Petrified. But even if today is an utter failure, I shall go on. This is what I have learned,” I told him. “Refusals will not kill me. Ridicule will not kill me. My feelings might be hurt, I might be embarrassed, I might want the ground to open beneath my feet, and others might wish the same for me, but I will not die. I will keep trying. I will live in gratitude, my face pointed toward the light.”

He squeezed my hand. “Then there is nothing to be scared of, is there?”

Maybe so, yet I held my breath as we turned the last corner.

I stared at the men and women waiting in front of the door, a veritable crowd. “For Vincent?”

“He has the only exhibit today.” Dries grinned.

Then the horses stopped, which woke Wil. I took his hand and led him to the end of the line, dazed.

Before I could recover, Daan de Jong was running out to greet us. “Mevrouw Van Gogh! Oh, madam, you are here. Splendid! Have you seen the line? I let a journalist friend in as we set up the works two days ago, and he wrote us up in yesterday’s paper. Look!”

He ushered us past the waiting crowd and into the exhibit itself, and it was as if my words to Anna on the train had sprung to life.

My friend and I looked at each other with tears in our eyes.

“A great success, madam.” De Jong threw his arms wide. “The critics all call Vincent van Gogh brilliant.”

You must do lighter, Theo had admonished Vincent in his letters in the beginning. More color. And Vincent, with all that darkness inside him, journeyed from the muddy browns of The Potato Eaters to the still-brown houses in the back, but colorful tulips in the front of Bulb Fields, then to the vibrant light and joy of the Sunflowers—pure color, pure light.

That light shone from all the paintings that graced the walls.

We walked around as if in a dream, Wil’s hand held tightly in mine. When people heard I was of the family, they came over to congratulate.

Some were artists I knew, Holst among them. How good it felt to hear them praise Vincent, those who had in the past called him a talentless hack.