Exporting to PDF, seeing a line I don't see on the artboard from hyperlink

Hello all,

I am an adobe novice, and am picking up the pieces from an unfinished project left by a colleague.

We wanted to edit a PDF to update our brochure (to print more copies, without typos).

My colleague created an illustrator file of the PDF and put some hyperlinks into the old text -- then she left our organization. I then deleted all the old text, and added new text. Everything looks good on the artboard. But, when I try to export to PDF, I see these two lines that are not visible on the artboard. When I click the lines, they are links to the hyperlinked pages.

When I scroll the mouse over those places in the artboard, I tried to delete the lines, but they won't go away. They become invisible on the artboard, but they are still there when I export to PDF.

Any ideas about how to remove these, or at least move them so they are aligned with the text that we want to link?

At first when I tried to delete them, the entire design in the background of the brochure would disappear. Now for some reason the design stays, even though I think I am deleting the lines. I also tried to cover them up by putting a white square on top of them (in front of the lines, behind the text), but they still show up in the PDF.

Thank you so much for any tips or ideas you can give me!