“Don’t you understand?” he raged at me. “I am going mad.”

My heart was drowning in all the tears I held back. “You are grieving. The pain shall lessen with time. I promise, dearest.”

“And if you’re wrong?” Theo’s voice broke. “If I do something unforgivable?”

“You will not harm yourself. You are not alone. You have me and your son. Your life is not hopeless, Theo. You are nothing like your brother.”

“Same blood, same flesh.” A lengthy, dark pause followed the words. “Jo, I no longer feel in control of myself.”

“Try, dearest.”

Another crash, closer to the door, sent me jumping back. I clutched Wil, mumbling another whispered prayer in an endless chain of whispered prayers.

When the front door behind me rattled, I jumped again, not knowing which way to run. “Who is it?”

“Dries.”

I rushed to let in my brother, rounding the piano Theo’s Aunt Cornelie had gifted us, which was in the way, still in the wrong spot, too close to the hearth. The sofa sat at the wrong angle. Half-unpacked boxes held our belongings. Theo had fallen ill so soon after our move, we hadn’t had the chance to fully unpack in the new apartment. If our living room was a painting, it could have been titled Life Interrupted.

I opened the door. “Oh, thank the merciful heavens.”

“Is it as bad as that?” But then Theo shattered something else and my brother could hear it for himself.

I flitted back to the bedroom. “Dries is here. Will you not come out to say hello?”

Nothing but more cursed silence. I hated those silences, their tyranny that made me wonder whether Theo might have done something to himself.

Dries came up to stand by me. “How long has he been like this?”

“Two weeks. But he’s been declining even before that.” First, that terrible cough that wouldn’t leave him for the past two years had grown even worse. We’d lived in fear of the flu epidemic. And he’d escaped that, but then came this dark melancholy. “He resigned from the gallery.”

“Has he anything else lined up?”

I blinked back tears.

“How will you live?”

“I don’t know. I don’t know anything. I’m so glad that you’re back.” My brother had been traveling in Belgium on business. I had held off telling him about Theo, but in a desperate moment the day before, I ended up sending him a telegram.

Inside the room, Theo screamed.

“Has he harmed you?”

“He wouldn’t. He is merely overcome with grief that he hadn’t done more for Vincent.”

Dries spoke through the door. “I say this as your friend, Theo. You did more for your brother than anyone else would have. And you couldn’t have saved him if you did a thousand times more. Vincent has always been broken.”

No response. At least, Theo didn’t break anything else.