‘It makes me want to throw up,’ Rico said, willing everything inside him to calm down so he could process it.
‘Me too. We’d better stick to Scotch.’
‘Fine with me.’
Finn took a moment to fix the drinks, then handed Rico a generously filled glass and sat in the chair opposite. ‘So what made you change your mind about meeting me? You disappeared pretty quickly the last time you were here.’
‘I wasn’t prepared.’
‘But you are now?’
‘Not entirely.’
For a moment his brother just looked at him in shrewd understanding. ‘I can appreciate that. When I discovered I was adopted—and that I had siblings I knew nothing about—it turned my world upside down.’
‘In what way?’
‘In pretty much every way. Everything I thought I knew had been a lie. Or that was what I believed, at least.’
‘You don’t now?’
‘Thanks to Georgie, no.’
Another woman with undue influence, although Finn didn’t seem particularly bothered by it. Judging by the smile playing at his mouth and the softening of his expression, he didn’t mind at all. And perhaps his brother’s life had been as gilded as he’d assumed.
‘I came because of this.’ Reaching into the top pocket on the inside of his jacket, Rico withdrew the letter he’d picked up from the solicitors only yesterday. As if having his thoughts dominated by Carla and Finn wasn’t frustrating enough, he hadn’t been able to stop thinking about that either, wondering now what it might contain, whether it might somehow be useful. He’d had to find out if it still existed before he drove himself mad. To both his astonishment and that of the archivist, it had been found in a file in a box in the basement.
‘What is it?’
‘A letter left for me by my adoptive parents to be read at the age of eighteen.’
‘And did you read it?’
‘Not then. I have now.’
‘What does it say?’
Rico didn’t have to look at it to remind himself of its contents. He knew every word off by heart. It was a letter penned by his mother and filled with love. She’d written about how much she and his father loved him and always would, but if he ever wanted to look for his birth parents, they’d understand and he should start here. He had broken down when he’d read it. The anger, grief and regret that he’d never had a chance to process had slammed into him and he’d sunk to the floor, racked with so much torment and pain that it had taken hours to blow itself out.
‘It gives the name of the agency my parents used to adopt me,’ he said gruffly.
‘Would you mind if I gave that information to the investigator I have working on the case?’
‘Not at all.’
‘Thank you.’
‘No problem.’
‘And how would you feel about doing a joint interview?’
‘What kind of an interview?’
‘The kind that might go viral and be seen by our elusive third brother.’
It would mean stepping out of the shadows, Rico thought with a faint frown as he rubbed his chest and briefly wondered at the absence of the cold sweat he might have expected at the idea. It would mean a rejection of the past and embracing the future.
But perhaps that was all right.