Page 351 of The Doctors Will See You Now

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.”