Upsetting people? I opened my mouth, my incandescence boiling over, and then thought better of it.

It was obvious Athena was referring to the Tilly Crabtree and Glorious foundation incident.

I marched back to my desk, festering with indignation. If upsetting people meant being honest and not making up bare-faced lies, then she could stick it up her—

“Oh, Leonie,” travelled Athena’s throaty voice across the sea of heads, as she prepared to retreat back into her office. “I’ll make sure you’re compensated for that little door.”

I sat at my desk for the remainder of the afternoon, seething like a volcano that was about to erupt.

Guilt clung to me about what had happened and not being able to explain it to Lily had made the whole situation take on an even greater and troubling significance.

I made a start on writing up copy for the Avanti cosmetics feature, but I kept throwing out the usual clichés and deleting it. In the end, I parked the article to one side and produced the letter to Lily from my back pocket. My eyes grazed the handwriting again.

I knew I should have returned it to Lily straightaway, whether she knew about it or not. But it hadn’t helped that she’d refused to answer her door and a letter like that wasn’t something you crammed through someone’s letterbox with a, “And oh, yes, I found this. See ya!”

I didn’t want her to think any less of me than she already did.

Some of my work colleagues had already slunk off for the evening, proclaiming urgent interviews to conduct or drinky-poos with valuable contacts. There was no sign of Athena either. She had brayed to Orion that she was meeting up with the PR of a high-end fashion house for lunch and hadn’t been seen since.

While the Glasgow traffic thrummed outside, I smoothed the passionate letter out and entered the name Flynn Talbot into the search engine.

I decided to have a trawl through Facebook first. I suspected it wouldn’t be a common name, or at least it didn’t sound like it.

How old would this gentleman be now, that’s if he was even still alive? Mid-seventies, going by Lily’s age when she opened her bakery. Would he use Facebook or social media at all? Was he still living in Scotland? I concluded it was worth a shot.

It transpired from my search that there were three people with the name Flynn Talbot. One was a twenty-five-year-old surfer-type living in Los Angeles. Another was a forty-year-old glass blowing artist based in the South of France. It didn’t look like the Flynn Talbot I was searching for could be either of them.

I clicked onto the third and last Flynn Talbot profile, my feelings of pessimism twisting in my stomach.