‘She came in here about four a.m. I wasn’t here. One of your men said she should go back to sleep but I doubt she followed instructions. Her son is missing.’ Pieter’s voice softened. ‘If I’m not mistaken, your son is missing.’

Ben flinched. He stood, stunned, letting the words sink in.

Last night there’d been room for doubt. Lily’s words had been almost incoherent, the desperate words of a woman who’d gone past the point of sense. But now… ‘She’s told you about me?’

‘She told me that Benjy was the son of a man she met at medical school. That you’d elected to be an emergency doctor with the SAS. That she’d chosen to come home, to raise your son alone because your worlds could never meet. And then yesterday…while Lily was scouring the island she went to my wife. She sobbed to her that you were here and how could she tell you about a son when she didn’t know if he was alive?’

‘She never told me,’ Ben whispered, trying to rid himself of this sense of unreality, not sure whether he was angry or confused or just…bereft. He should be angry, he thought. The appropriate emotion should definitely be anger, but bereft was winning.

He had a son.

Where the hell was he?

‘She’d only just learned she was pregnant when she came home,’ Pieter was saying, watching his face. ‘This island is a very easy place to raise a child without a father. In a sense we’re a huge family where parenting is done by all. She wouldn’t have seen the need…’

He had it now. Anger in spades, sweeping through him with a ferocity he found breathtaking.

‘She wouldn’t have seen the need to tell me? She didn’t think I had the right to know?’

‘She said you feared relationships,’ Pieter said, ‘But she also said you were a moral man who’d want to do the right thing by your son. She said her decision was not to load you with that responsibility.’

‘But even you know…’

‘Lily and I have worked side by side for almost seven years,’ Pieter said, reassuringly, as if Ben was a little unhinged and he had to settle him. Which maybe wasn’t far from the truth. ‘I’m the cousin of her mother. There’s little about Lily I don’t know.’