Lily looked across at me, her eyes softening in her lined but gentle expression. “Was that when you wrote the letter that Leonie found?”

I took my cue and removed the letter from my bag and passed it up the table to Flynn senior.

He took it reverently in his hands, his attention grazing over it. “Yes. My God, after all these years…” Lily shook her head as she watched Flynn senior holding it. “I have no idea what it says.”

She gave me an apologetic look. “Leonie tried to return it to me on the day she discovered it in Merry Wood, but I was so stubborn and I wouldn’t open the door to her.”

Flynn senior’s jaw dropped. “But I thought you read it at the time.”

“I never even knew that letter existed until you told me about it,” clarified Lily. “Like you said, Bernard must have found it and given it to Astrid.”

There were meaningful glances exchanged all around the table. Lily’s expression cleared with realisation. “They must have concealed it; conspired together to keep us apart.”

Lily drank in Flynn senior’s features beside her. “I was so hurt, so stunned at the time that you didn’t tell me first, Flynn. Now I know why.”

Diana’s fascination was evident. “So, what happened? Why didn’t you go to the police about the abuse?”

Flynn senior shook his head of thick silvery hair. “I was stupid, my dear. I felt ashamed. Domestic abuse wasn’t taken seriously in those days; not like it is now. And can you imagine how abuse against a husband, perpetrated by a wife would have been treated back then? Who would have believed me? I went away to Africa with Astrid as you no doubt know, but she fell back into her old ways while we were there.”

He scanned us all. “That was when I realised how much I wanted to be with Lily. Even more than before.” Flynn senior’s attention drifted to Carl. “I had my son to think of too.”

Carl swallowed.

“What I didn’t know was that Lily waited for me, which I didn’t deserve.”

Lily clutched and squeezed at his hand again. “That was my decision to make Flynn, not yours.”

Flynn senior carried on talking. “When we arrived back in Scotland, I went straight to see Lily, but her husband told me she wanted nothing more to do with me. He knew how we felt about one another.”

“And Merry Wood?” asked Carl, the shock still shining out of his face.

Flynn senior’s eyes were bursting with the memories of it all. “Lily and I had spent so many happy times wandering around in the garden there. I had even painted her a few times. We always fantasised about the three of us living happily ever after there. You, Lily, and me.”