“Who wrote the green diary you gave me? I thought it was yours, but now that I’m reading it…” I’d only managed the first entry on the plane. “In the front of the book, someone wrote the name Clara. But inside the diary, she calls herself Jo. She lived in the Netherlands a hundred years ago. How did her diary end up in New York? Why is it in English? And, most importantly, why do you have it? Wouldn’t something like this stay in the family? Are we related to Vincent van Gogh?”

For most of my life, I’ve been trying to figure out who my grandfather was. Was Violet telling me who my great-great-great-grandfather was instead?

Johanna Bonger married Theo van Gogh. I looked it up on the internet. They had one son. His descendants are well-documented. My ancestors weren’t among them.

Yet Violet had the diary.

If I wasn’t Jo and Theo’s great-great-etc-granddaughter, could I be Vincent’s? The theory gripped me, filled me with a wild thrill. Vincent never married, never had children. On the record. He did frequent houses of prostitution, however. He lived across the street from one when he lived in the famous Yellow House he painted in Arles. When he cut off his ear, he gifted it to one of those prostitutes across the street.

My next thought would kill my mother if I ever spoke it out loud, but…

Was one of our ancestors the love child of a French whore and Vincent van Gogh?

Chapter Four

Chapter Four

Johanna

1888, June, Scheveningen, Netherlands

“Did you have a tragic love affair in Utrecht? Is that why you fell so sick? Did Theo van Gogh visit?” My best friend, Anna, kept pestering me as we hurried along the beach. She was driven by fear that her mother was going to be frightfully cross with us if we arrived late for lunch again. I was staying with her family at a resort in Scheveningen. “Did Theo and Eduard duel over your heart?”

“No. Because my life is not a Shakespeare drama.” I kept up with her, driven by hope that the letter the postman mentioned when our paths crossed on the way out was from the man I loved. I would have turned around right then and there to claim and read the missive, but I’d wished to escape Anna’s chiding about being obsessed with Eduard. “I haven’t seen Theo since he proposed.”

The wind whipped our white linen skirts like fishing boat sails, and when it failed to blow us off course, it went after our wide-brimmed straw hats. As we fought the gusts, our heels sank into the soft sand. We struggled on, undeterred, regardless.

“There had to be heartbreak involved.” Anna’s voice carried a measure of hurt. She thought I was keeping secrets from her. “A third man? Was he maddeningly handsome?”