Dr. ER (St. Luke's Docuseries #2) Page 24

  The worst part of the story, Brent had been the mastermind of it, and it was all in the name of greed and power. He hadn’t realized I’d overheard his phone conversations when the shit hit the fan, and I’d walked away from our relationship after that with some bullshit excuse of not wanting to be in the public limelight anymore. It had nothing to do with the limelight and everything to do with the fact that I’d realized he was a horrible human being. I got out to save myself.

  And even though right now I wanted to say all of the nasty things that rested on the tip of my tongue, I held back. Tempting as it was, I knew taking that route wasn’t in my or, especially, Scott’s best interest. Brent was a man of power, and he had no moral compass to guide his use of that power in the direction of straight and narrow. If I showed any suspicion that I thought he was involved, I honestly had no idea what lengths he would go to to prove the opposite.

  “I—I just don’t know how this happened,” I muttered and faked a sad sigh. “I don’t know how this happened, Brent.”

  “I wish I could do more, LoLo,” he said, and I knew his words were complete bullshit.

  I had no idea why he’d be involved in something like this, something that had to do with Scott, but my gut instinct screamed that he was. Sure, a very long time ago, we’d been a couple, but an overt use of his resources for the sole reason of jealously didn’t add up.

  I also knew I needed to get the fuck out of his office.

  “Thanks for listening,” I said and stood. “Sorry I screwed up your schedule.”

  “Oh, come on, LoLo.” He grinned his blindingly white politician’s smile. “You know you can screw up my schedule anytime. I’ll always make time for you.”

  His words might have sounded genuine, but I knew they were covered in slime.

  “Thanks again,” I said and headed for the door.

  “The offer still stands, you know,” he added before I opened it. “I’d love to get together and catch up.”

  I looked over my shoulder and glanced at the powerful man who sat behind his desk. He might’ve painted the perfect persona to the outside world, but I knew this was not the kind of man I wanted to keep anywhere but far, far the fuck away. Not only from me, but from the people I loved the most—especially Scott.

  “I’ll keep in touch,” I lied and forced a fake smile to my face and left his office quicker than I’d arrived. Bypassing Pam’s desk and the glare I could feel practically burning a hole through my head, I kept my gaze focused on the hallway and walked quickly to the elevator. I didn’t want to be around these venomous people for a minute longer than I had to.

  Plus, I had bigger fish to fry. I had to find a way to clear Scott’s name before he lost everything.

  If he hasn’t already lost everything…

  My heart stuttered painfully at that thought. Fucking hell. I had to think. I had to figure out a way to handle this before anything else happened. Once I reached the sidewalk outside of City Hall, I hailed a cab and told the driver to take me to my dad’s place in hopes that he’d have the wisdom to help me get Scott out of this situation. And since I knew Nicole was most likely there, I hoped she’d know what to do when it came to getting Scott to believe me that I didn’t write that article.

  As I stared out the window, mindlessly watching skyscrapers and pedestrians pass by in a blur and worrying a hole in my lip with my teeth, my phone startled me with a text notification. I pulled it out of my purse, and relief bloomed in my stomach once I read the message.

  Stella: David has definitive proof that your account was hacked. We’ve pulled the article and posted an apology to the public, and Scott, in its place.

  Me: They’ve taken Scott into custody, Stella. You need to get David to head down to the police station now so that he doesn’t get charged with anything.

  Stella: He already called. I’m sorry this happened, Harlow.

  I was surprised by her candid apology. Stella wasn’t the type of woman to apologize for anything, but it was a relief to see that she had at least an ounce of care inside of her normally dark heart to understand that this situation was not okay. I also hoped like fuck this new information to the police would help Scott immediately.

  Me: I feel like we need to do more, Stella. Even though my account was hacked, this situation is Gossip’s fault. Scott deserves more from us than an apology article. His entire life has been turned upside down because of this.

  Stella: What else do you have in mind?

  Me: A press conference. Every media and news source in New York needs to understand that this article is false and these accusations are not true.

  Stella: I’ll get it scheduled for this afternoon.

  Me: Really?

  Stella: I might be a hard-ass, but I’m not callous, Harlow. Believe me, I’m sympathetic to this situation, especially to both you and Scott. I’ll clear my schedule and get a press conference scheduled for this afternoon.

  Me: Thank you.

  It might not have been a solution, but it was a start.

  Now, I just needed to find a way to get Scott to talk to me, and as I walked up the concrete steps of my dad’s place, I prayed that he and Nicole would help me.

  “It’s not just the article, Scott,” my thankfully kind officer of the law stated finally, after thirty minutes of mind-numbing circles of question and answer about everything in my life. The hospital, my relationship with the patients—even my relationship with Harlow.

  Her article of bullshit had been painfully detailed—I’d noticed that the first time I’d read it—and now I was being forced to relive every false claim over and over again. But while the article itself had been the focus of this interrogation, apparently now there was something more.

  “What? What else?”

  Detective Santos sighed. “We got an anonymous call as soon as it broke. She claimed to be scared to come forward personally, but strongly suggested the allegations against you were factual in nature.”

  My face felt clammy in my hands. The urge to bury myself in them had been pressing all day, but at this bewildering and shittacular news, I couldn’t fight it anymore.

  “Oh God.”

  “Scott.”

  “It just doesn’t make any sense,” I muttered, head still firmly in my hands. “Never. I would never do anything with a woman without consent. Hell, enthusiastic consent. If I’m touching a woman, you better believe she’s told me she wants me to. Period.”

  “Look, we’re going to look into this.”

  “Can you…I don’t know…trace the call from today? Find out who this woman is?”

  He looked at me with wrinkled eyes and a slightly downturned mouth.

  “Sorry. You’re the detective here.”

  He smiled then.

  “I know this is not how you planned on spending your day today.”

  I laughed, completely devoid of humor. To say the fucking least. The last week with Harlow had been perfect. Literally everything I’d never known I wanted. Everything I’d distinctly thought I didn’t want.

  But Christ, it was good.

  Finally, some of what she’d been so vehement about this morning broke through. “She says she didn’t write it,” I whispered, mostly to myself.

  Detective Santos didn’t think anything I said in an interrogation room was to myself. And he was right.

  “Yep. I heard that too, and it’s worth looking into. You’ve been an upstanding member of the community long enough that I’m willing to give you the benefit of the doubt until something proves to me I shouldn’t. You stitched up my daughter’s chin when she tripped and fell into the coffee table, for shit’s sake, Scott.”

  He sighed.

  “I don’t want to see you here any more than you want to be here.”

  I nodded, bit my lip, and turned to the side.

  “So, here’s the plan,” he declared, sinking a hip onto the shiny metal table in front of me and leaning into his thigh. “You’re going to be released. You’re not going to
leave the city, and you’re not going to go out to the clubs or the bars or whatever.”

  I snorted, and he narrowed his eyes.

  I straightened up immediately. “Sorry. Just…yeah…you don’t have to worry about that. Pretty sure I’m going to lock myself in my apartment and sleep until this nightmare is over.”

  He smiled. “Good plan. We’ll look into everything, and if no one comes forward with serious evidence, something we could take to court on this, we’ll release a statement that you’ve been questioned and cleared.”

  I shook my head and then nodded. I knew it was a confusing mess of opposites, but I couldn’t help it. That was what I was feeling. Because everything he said was great. I knew I hadn’t actually committed crimes against women. In a perfect world, I’d be cleared, they’d make a statement, and that would be that.

  But in the real world, I had someone falsely accusing me, my girlfriend was at the center of this shit, my job security was questionable at best—even if they cleared me—and no statement to the media would ever completely clear my name.

  Innocent in the eyes of the law and innocent in the eyes of the public were two different things, and it was a pretty short trip from Dr. Erotic to Sex Offender in the world of reality TV.

  “Come on, Scott,” Detective Santos said, pulling me from my seriously depressing thoughts. “I’ll walk you out.”

  I nodded and stood, following him out of the room and through the bullpen as he led the way to the front doors. There was a set of stairs that led down to the entrance, but the doors were glass. I could see pretty well that it was a goddamn media circus out there just as it had been outside of my apartment when we came here.

  I groaned. “Great.”

  Detective Santos followed my gaze. “Ah, shit. All right. You can go out the back entrance. Come on.”

  “Thank you, Jesus,” I said aloud, happy to be free of at least one current burden.

  Detective Santos smirked. “It’s pronounced Hey-Zeus.”

  Safely back in my apartment building—Detective Santos had been nice enough to have a cruiser give me a lift to a block up from the building—I stepped onto the elevator, waited for the doors to close, and then sank into the back wall.

  All of my energy was gone.

  The last ten hours felt like two hundred, and I hadn’t been lying when I told Detective Santos I would just sleep until it was over. Honestly, that felt like the only way to survive this shit.

  The ding of the elevator pulled me from my thoughts, so I opened my eyes and stepped off as soon as the doors opened.

  Digging the keys from my pocket, I inserted them in the lock and gave them a turn when the knob pulled right out of my hand.

  “Harlow?” I asked, scrubbing at my face as she held the door open and gestured for me to come inside.

  This is my apartment, right? What the hell is going on here?

  “What are you doing here?” I asked. “How did you get in?”

  Guiltily, she glanced behind her and then looked back to me. “With the help of my dad and your mom.”

  “Christ.”

  I looked past her to the couch. Bill and my mom sat there, hand in hand.

  The last thing I wanted was to have to face my mom right now.

  “Jesus Christ, Harlow!” I scrubbed a hand down my face and sighed in exasperation. I was fucking done. Part of me believed everything she was saying, but another part, the part that had literally been through the emotional ringer, didn’t have its usual ability to align important things like fault and consequences. “Don’t you think you’ve done enough?”

  She jerked like I’d struck her, and my mom jumped to her feet. “Enough, Scott. Come sit down and hear her out. We did, and that’s why we’re here. We all know you didn’t do this.” She moved closer, around the couch to right in front of me and took my hand. “All of us,” she stressed.

  I pulled her into my arms and buried my face in her neck, a few tears pooling in my eyes. Sometimes, even at thirty-five years old, you just needed your mom.

  She let me hold her for several minutes before she spoke again. “Come on, now. Let’s sit down.”

  I nodded and moved with her, around the couch and the coffee table, and took a seat on a chair. I didn’t have it in me to sit next to someone right now.

  “Harlow, honey,” my mom prompted. “Why don’t you tell Scott what you told us?”

  Harlow nodded and took a seat on the couch. She looked like it killed her to do it, but she knew I was trying to put space between us, and by some miracle, chose to respect that.

  “Okay. Well, you know I’d been struggling to come up with an article for this week.”

  I nodded.

  “And you know I told you last night that I’d finally come up with something.”

  I nodded again.

  “And you know that I asked you not to be mad?”

  “Yes, Low. I know all of these things. What I didn’t know was that you were accusing me of being a rapist!”

  “Scott, calm down, son,” Bill advised, taking a stand and putting a hand to my shoulder.

  Harlow’s face lost all of its careful calm though. She charged, grabbing me by the jaws and ignoring all of the carefully constructed space I’d erected.

  “I. Didn’t. Write. That.”

  I stared back at her, a goddamn mess, fighting to let her words sink in.

  “Scott, I fucking promise you. I didn’t. Those were not my words,” she whispered, and tears started to drip from her lids and down her cheeks.

  God, she looked desperate.

  And Harlow Paige never looked desperate, not for anyone or anything.

  There were sad lines around her normally bright eyes, and her small shoulders, sagging forward noticeably, appeared to be carrying the weight of the world. But mostly, it was her determination and the way she refused to break eye contact with me that made my heart start talking some sense into my stubborn head. The anger, the honesty, the affection in her eyes. It finally all sank in. I nodded and took a shaky breath.

  “Scott, I didn’t write that,” she whispered again, more tears rolling down her cheeks.

  I nodded again, and she repeated herself. “I didn’t. I wrote an article about what an amazing doctor you are. I even did interviews with a few of the pediatric patients we’d taken care of in the emergency room. It was sweet and adorable, and it definitely wasn’t what they published,” she explained on a shaky breath. “That awful fucking article they published wasn’t mine. I’d never do something like that. Not to anyone and especially not to you. I love you, Scott.”

  Realization turned into conviction. She didn’t write that article. Harlow might’ve been a gossip columnist, but she had morals and strong convictions and she’d never write something to intentionally destroy someone’s life. She might have held her heart pretty fucking close to the vest, but that heart of hers was huge.

  I tried to focus on what she had to be going through, feeling like she was responsible for so much turmoil in my life when she actually wasn’t, but I had a whole litany of my own problems, despite her innocence.

  I nodded, her lips sinking closer to mine, more tears spilling from her eyes. “I’m so, so sorry.”

  The salt of her tears stung on my tortured lips. I’d been chewing on them for hours.

  “I believe you.”

  Her breath was audible and shaky as she touched her lips to mine, once, twice, three times, and climbed into my lap.

  “Thank God,” she mumbled as she buried her face in my neck and let a few tortured sobs bubble all the way out. I gave her a moment to compose herself before ripping off the comfort of her Band-Aid.

  “But what are we going to do about all of this? I’m so fucking glad it wasn’t you, but it was someone. How am I supposed to handle that?”

  “With your head high,” my mom interjected, reminding me she was there.

  My face pinched in disbelief. “You want me to shrug this off? Act like it’s no big deal?” Stead
ily and with each word, my volume increased until I was nearly at a yell.

  Harlow sensed how close I was to the edge and put her hands to either side of my jaw to turn my face back to her.

  With soft green eyes—the softest she’d ever bestowed upon me—Harlow did her best to heal the hurt inside of me with nothing more than a look.

  I wrapped her up as tight as I could manage.

  I still didn’t know what the fuck was going on, but if she didn’t write it, when all was said and done, I knew I had at least one thing left to hold on to—her.

  “You don’t shrug off anything. Gossip already did a press conference, admitting that because of a computer security issue, they’re uncertain of the source of the article or the validity of the statements within it. I know that doesn’t help much—”

  “They already did a press conference?” I asked, mystified. “When?”

  “This afternoon while you were still in police custody,” my mom offered helpfully.

  Christ. Police custody. How was this my life?

  At the thought of what my visit to the precinct had entailed, I shook my head. “Well, that’s good I guess. But that doesn’t clear me completely. According to the detective, they got an anonymous call from a woman claiming I’d assaulted her.”

  “What?” Harlow shouted as my mom gasped.

  I nodded, pulling back from Harlow enough to scrub a hand down my face. “I know. It’s not good.”

  “Who the hell would do that?” my mom asked, distraught. I’d never seen Nicole Shepard distraught in my life, and I decided in that moment I never wanted to see it again.

  Harlow just looked angry. The line of her eyes changed from a curve to a point, and her mouth set in a firm line. “I’ve got a fucking idea.”

  A few weeks later…

  “Thanks for coming down,” Detective Santos greeted us as we walked into his office.