Page 154 of The Doctors Will See You Now

“Harlow,” Scott answered and nodded toward me. “That’s how I met her. I had to suture her riding injury.”

I was going to kill him before Kinky Boots even started if he kept saying riding.

“How did she look afterward?” my father asked. “I bet she was a bit shaken up from that reckless rider.”

Scott grinned shamelessly, his cheeks coming to life with a rosy flush as he basked in my embarrassment. “She did look a little shaken up. Mostly just angry, though.”

“You were angry?” my father questioned and looked at me. “I really wish you would have gotten that rider’s name. I’d love to call him and give him a piece of my mind. No one should be that reckless.”

“I agree,” Scott piped up again. I wanted to smack him. “People should ride responsibly.”

“You’re right.” His mother nodded in agreement. “People should ride responsibly. Otherwise, they shouldn’t be allowed to ride at all.”

Now, although I was internally dying a slow death, given the circumstances that led to this very humiliation, it was hard not to agree with that. Barron the Bore should’ve had his riding rights revoked immediately after he rode my ass straight into the ER. Although, in Barron’s pathetic defense, a few days after his bed had sliced my head opened, he did send me an apology in the form of a nice bouquet of flowers. I appreciated the sentiment, but no contact with Barron for the next one thousand years was still the plan.

“So, you didn’t get the man’s name?” Scott questioned, childishly continuing this farce of a conversation for nothing more than his enjoyment, and I fought the urge to roll my eyes.

“Nope.”

“Really? I would’ve thought you would’ve at least gotten a name or phone number…something…”

“I didn’t,” I snapped.

My dad sighed heavily. “You really should have gotten that rider’s name, Low,” he added in disappointment, but thanks to the dimming lights, both my view of his disappointment and the time for speaking began to fade.

And for once in my life, as the curtain started to lift, a Broadway show was my favorite fucking thing on the planet.

My least favorite thing? Scott fucking Shepard.

Harlow Paige.

Frances Harlow Paige.

Harlow fucking Paige, the Gossip columnist, was Bleeding Woman.

Bleeding Woman was Frances.

And Frances, well, she was Harlow Paige.

I’d been running through the convoluted web—okay, it’s not that complicated, but the distorted reality I’d believed to be true made it feel like it—of her identities as the actors on stage danced and sang for six full songs. Now, well entrenched in the seventh, a song about a woman who was always choosing the wrong guys, an intense burn had taken root in my stomach with the sting of reality.

Of course they were the same person.

In hindsight, I should have known. Sure, New York City has millions of people, and the chances of them being the same person were slim—statistically speaking—but life had a funny way of working out like this.

And the personalities matched up perfectly.

Challenging to the point of agitation, Harlow Bleeding Paige, held my attention. Both her visit to the ER and the witty exaggeration of her articles had seized a curious part of me in a nagging, torturous way I hadn’t been able to forget. Day after day, I’d wondered about the woman I’d sutured and the woman who wrote passive-aggressive columns about me that bled a little too close to the line, and everything that’d been muddled and smudged by uncertainty of who and why now felt clear in my mind.

One complicated woman was at the center of it all. Glancing past my mother, I scoured the lines of Harlow’s face for some sign of remorse or discomfort. A wrinkled brow. A minute frown. I moved on to her body. A clenched fist. A nervous fidget. Something.

But she gave me nothing.

Instead, her eyes were glassy, the shimmer of their moisture glinting in the glow of the stage lights as she worked at her bottom lip with the edge of her teeth. One hand rubbed at a tight-covered thigh, and the toe of her boot bobbed to the music. She seemed thoughtful without looking anxious, like each word of the song would expose some vulnerable part of her if she weren’t careful.

As discreetly as possible, so as not to garner the ire of my musical-bopping mother, I pulled my phone from my pocket and fired off a text to a number I’d saved to my phonebook, like a normal person.

Me: So you’re Bleeding Woman.