Refusing to debate it a second longer, I clicked the cursor on the Message button and began to type, the rattling of my keyboard echoing.

After drafting and deleting several attempts at a short but concise-sounding piece of correspondence, I came up with something I hoped would elicit a response:

Dear Mr Talbot,

Please excuse me for troubling you.

My name is Leonie Baxter. I’m a journalist and a friend of Lily Cruickshank.

Ok, describing myself as her friend was rather an exaggeration.

I accidentally came across a letter you wrote to her a number of years ago and wondered if you might be interested in reaching out to her?

I then quoted my email address and mobile number.

Should you wish to make contact with Lily, please do not hesitate to let me know.

Thank you for your time.

Yours sincerely,

Leonie

I read over the composed message again, my fingers loitering above the keys. I dismissed a stab of hesitancy. Lily couldn’t keep living like that, obsessing over that empty house. She had to move on. We all did in the end, I concluded, trying not to conjure up more pictures of Miles.

I pressed Send and let out a long, low breath.

Ok, so if anything did come of it, Lily would no doubt want to disembowel me with a teaspoon, but this might just offer her the opportunity to cast off the shackles of years ago.

I admit I was very curious about Merry Wood too and wanted to know more. My journalist’s intuition for a story was well and truly piqued.

The next few days vanished in a flurry of beauty write-ups, a phone interview I conducted with the new CEO of a skincare company whose packaging was made from recycled paper, and a number of Athena’s infamous team meetings, which were really butt-kicking exercises under a different name – whether the staff needed their butts kicked or not.

I dipped into my Facebook messages but there had been no response from Flynn Talbot. Perhaps my optimism had been misplaced. If it was him, maybe he wanted the past to remain where it was and whatever had happened between him and Lily was, as far as he was concerned, confined to history. There was also the subject of his wife, Astrid, to whom he had referred in the letter, and the question of whether she was still alive.

If Flynn Talbot didn’t want to revisit those days, what could I do?

I was musing over whether Flynn Talbot was busy, suffering from ill-health, or had simply decided to ignore my message when another dark thought imbedded itself. Oh blimey. What if he had passed away? I checked his account again and saw that it was several weeks since he had posted anything – a photograph of a stream under a mingling sunrise sky of raspberry and gold.