“So why did you want to speak to me? Why have you changed your mind? You said on the phone the man who wrote this letter is your grandfather?”

He pushed himself forward in his seat, his black curls curling around the base of his neck. He raised both hands up in front of him in a gesture of surrender. “Whoa! One question at a time!”

Flynn looked agonised. Then he folded his arms. His mouth flatlined. “Yes. He is.”

I stared across the table at this Flynn Talbot, trying to unravel why he had decided to speak to me now. Flynn had been adamant he didn’t know his namesake and had denied having any knowledge of who he might be. He had insisted it was just a coincidence they shared the same name. And now he was confessing that the man who wrote to Lily, was in fact his grandfather?

I allowed this revelation to sink in. “And the son mentioned by your grandfather in the letter?”

“My father, Carl.”

I slotted and pieced together these fragments of information. I pinned him to his seat with a disapproving look. “You knew this the first time I told you about the letter. You realised it was your grandfather who wrote it. So why didn’t you say anything then? Why did you deny knowing him?”

Why had he just disappeared with these secrets?

Flynn’s jaw, dusted with a hint of dark stubble, tightened. “Well, I’m telling you now.”

I could feel my irritation burning. “You could have saved me time and hassle by being honest from the beginning.”

His level stare back made me prickle in my seat. “I’m not in the habit of speaking to journalists. Well, not anymore.”

I arched my brows. What did that mean?

“Anyway, that’s your job, isn’t it? To investigate and uncover things?” He raised one black brow at me and my cheeks flushed. Arrogant sod!

“It still would have been appreciated if you had told me this at the start.”

I thought back to our previous phone conversation. “So why now? You still haven’t explained. Why agree to talk to me?” A thought occurred to me. “It was when I told you about Lily’s heart condition, wasn’t it?”

His fingers twiddled with the cup of macchiato in front of him.

“Your conscience told you that you had to say something.”

His dark lashes dashed against his cheeks as he glanced away. He shrugged and tried to look indifferent. “I knew I wouldn’t get any peace if I didn’t speak to you. All those Facebook messages and the emails…”

I stared levelly across the table. “And that was the only reason?”

“Does the reason why matter?”

I eyed him. “Your grandfather wrote this letter to Lily in 1973.”

“While he was married to my grandmother, no less.” Flynn ground his white teeth.

“Is your grandfather still alive?”