“Thanks,” Emma said, and Lindsey was pretty sure that it was non-ironic.

She spent her lunch hour eating a tuna fish sandwich at her desk while reading the articles. The later ones all read pretty much the same about a boy born in Manchester being raised by a single mom who got a scholarship to the Italia Conti Academy of Theater Arts in London. The articles glossed over his rebellious youth, his troubles with the law and a stint in jail. The earlier articles had more meat and more bite, since Robbie was not yet a huge star with PR handlers who could cushion and bend his interviews to their will.

It was an article in the Times that caught Lindsey’s attention. Robbie had just starred in Noël Coward’s Design for Living at the Gielgud Theatre on Shaftesbury Avenue to rave reviews. The reporter joined Robbie for breakfast and found him quite distraught. He had just been informed that he was to be a father. He was not happy about the news. He told the reporter that he and the mother, an American soap opera actress, had just had a fling, one that hadn’t been good enough that he’d want a reminder of it for the rest of his life.

Lindsey cringed. He was young in the article, true, but he came off as harsh, selfish and frankly nasty. He did not sound like the charming man she had come to know. She wondered if the PR firms took over his press shortly after this mess.

She scanned the next two years’ worth of articles. There was no mention of a wife until he’d married Kitty ten years ago. Kitty was American, but Lindsey doubted she was the mother of Robbie’s unnamed child; as far as she knew, they had had no children.

Lindsey wondered what had happened to the mother and child. She checked the date of the article and she figured the baby would be somewhere in its late teens now. She scanned the next few years of articles. The pieces were much less invasive. It was easy to see that Robbie had control of his interviews now, and he gave away nothing that he didn’t want known.

The actress was out of the business. She had married a tycoon and moved to Austria. There was nothing current about her, but Lindsey looked up the story line to the soap opera and her character had been pregnant at the same time she would have been. Had they written it into the show just for her? It seemed likely.

Violet had known Robbie since before his debut on Shaftesbury Avenue in London when she had been a guest teacher at his acting school. Lindsey wondered if they’d been close back then and if so, did Violet know he’d fathered a child?