He was quiet for a beat and then laughed quietly. “Yeah.”

“So, like this, we’re actually talking for once, and then her twat of an ex calls.”

“Yeah.”

“And it’s obvious he did a right number on her but she just shut down and couldn’t get away fast enough after that. She’ll have sex with me until she can barely walk, but she won’t tell me why it took her over a month to agree to actually have a meal with me.”

“Uh huh.”

“So her parents own a store and she grew up in Chicago. That’s it? I know nothing about her, really.”

“Yeah.”

“Will, are you even listening to me?”

“Of course I’m listening. You know nothing.”

“Right.”

“So . . . have you googled her?” he asked.

“Of course not,” I said.

“Why?”

I groaned. “I thought we had this conversation after the Cecily debacle. Nothing good comes from personal Google searches.”

“But professionally, if you’re working with someone new, you look them up, right?”

“Of course.”

“Well, I googled Sara as soon as I knew she’d be one of my contacts at RMG. It sure was informative.”

My throat grew tight, and I tugged uselessly at my collar. “Tell me what you saw.”

He laughed. “Not a chance. Find some balls and strap them on while your laptop boots. And on that note, this little chat’s been great but I gotta go. Company.”

I directed Scotty back to my building. Once upstairs, I made it all of five minutes before I was at the computer and typing the name “Sara Dillon” into the search engine.

Holy shit.

There wasn’t just the odd mention here and there; there were pages and pages of results, possibly more than I’d find on myself. I took a deep breath and went to the images first, scrolling through photos of her that had to span at least the last ten years of her life. She was so young in some of them, her butterscotch hair styled in a sleek pixie in some, a messy shag in others. In all of them, her smile was unguarded and naïve.

And these weren’t just a collection of family snapshots or selfies; they were high-definition paparazzi photos taken with expensive zoom lenses, bought and sold to newspapers and magazines with exclamation-point-heavy titles, even video and archived news footage. There were parties and weddings, charity events and vacations, and almost always with the same man at her side.

He was only a few inches taller than she was, with black hair and sharp, Roman features. His bright, toothy smile looked about as sincere as I imagined it would, which is to say not sincere in the slightest.

So this was Andy. Known to the world as Andrew Morton. Democratic congressman, serving the seventh district of Illinois.

Suddenly, a lot of things were falling into place.

With a resigned sigh, I clicked on what seemed to be a fairly recent picture; her hair was about the same as it was now and there was a Christmas tree in the background. The caption below the photo read: