I scrolled through the images over and over, determined to spot the conscienceless bastard who hid among the lambs.

And then I found him, a clean-cut twenty-something with a smug smile, caught exiting a room. The door behind him stood half open, revealing bookshelves.

He wasn’t the focus of the photograph. He was in the background, half hidden behind a glamorous older couple. The more I enlarged, the blurrier the picture became, but I could see a dark line on his jaw—a scratch? And something white below his waist that looked like the corner of his shirt caught in his zipper.

I clicked on the image description, desperate for a name, but only the couple was listed. “Mr. & Mrs. Wannamaker.”

I combed through all the pictures again, searching for that specific smug face. I found him with a timid-looking woman, just arriving to the party. This time, he was the focus of the picture, and he was identified.

“Taylor Wertheim, the junior senator from Massachusetts, with his bride.”

I immediately googled him.

“He is still alive.”

Chapter Sixteen

Johanna

1890, October 12, Paris, France

Never say that life could not be worse. Nor ever say that luck had turned and nothing but blue skies wait ahead. Fate will hear and laugh.

I had told my friend Anna once that I would rather have a year of intense happiness than small moments doled out over a lifetime, and I received a year, but only that. By the time October arrived, our lives were unraveling so quickly, I couldn’t catch my breath.

Theo was unable to overcome his brother’s death. He fell from one malady into the next, until even his mind became affected.

“You must eat, dearest,” I pleaded with him through our bedroom door, wanting nothing more than to nurse him back to health. “At least come out to the kitchen.”

He no longer allowed me inside. I had been sleeping in our son’s room, my only interaction with Theo when he let me pass him a plate.

“Vincent deserved better!” he shouted. “If I hadn’t made the decisions I made, if I could go back… What have I done? He was fully dependent on me. I knew that!”

He yelled in Dutch, and then yelled in French, and then yelled words I couldn’t understand.

The doctor had been there the day before, but Theo would not let him inside the bedroom either. I’d passed his medicine in with the previous night’s meal, but had no way of telling if the potion had been taken. “Vincent is at peace. You said so yourself. He is at rest.”

“I failed him. And I am just like him, don’t you see?”

Something crashed inside. Wil began to cry and crawled to me. I picked him up.

“Would you eat lunch with us?” I begged his father. “Or at least take a plate?”

No response, only silence.

“A glass of milk?”