Page 112 of The Hollywood Switch-up

He pulled out his phone and called. Voicemail—that generic recording she’d never bothered to personalize.

“It’s me. I’m at your door, which you know, because you’re ignoring me.” His voice came out rougher than he intended. “Three days ago, you were in my arms. You looked at me like—” He stopped. This wasn’t something to say to a recording. “And now I can’t get you to look at me, and I don’t know if that’s because of something I did or because someone else did something to you, and I need you to tell me which one it is.”

He pressed his forehead against the door. “No me importa what it is. Whatever happened, whatever you’re carrying, you don’t have to carry it alone.” A breath. “I’m not going anywhere. Eso es todo. That’s the whole message.”

He pocketed the phone and stood there with his forehead against the wood, imagining she was doing the same thing on the other side and knowing she probably wasn’t, and then he pushed off and straightened his shoulders. Thirty-five minutes to call time.

The set was worse. At least at her door, he could pretend she might not be home. Here, she was thirty feet away, hitting her mark in the sand, and she still wouldn’t look at him.

Stefan leaned against the equipment truck and watched her instead of the monitors—the rigid line of her shoulders, the smile she gave the AD. That wasn’t her smile. That was Anneliese’s smile—the public one, the professional one—and on Erika’s face, she was disappearing.

The slate clapped and she became Luna, and he stood on his mark close enough to smell her shampoo and watched her walk toward him and deliver the line—“I thought you were different”—and her voice cracked on the last word, and for one unguarded second, her eyes met his and he saw it. Terror. Exhaustion. Something like grief. Then Martin called cut and the mask slammed back into place and she stepped away from him.

¿Qué te hizo, Erika?

Because it was Martin. He knew that much—knew it without being able to prove it, in the flinch when that voice cut across the sand, in how she’d been holding herself smaller every day like she was trying to fold herself into a place he couldn’t reach.

And then he realized what he’d missed. He’d been watching her so closely that he hadn’t clocked what she was looking at. He turned now—casual, an actor loosening up between takes—and there it was. Martin’s chair. Fifteen feet behind where Stefan had been standing. The angle was right. The sightline was clean.

She’d seen Martin watching, and she’d shut down. Not avoidance. Not heartbreak. A woman seeing a threat and going dead inside.

¿Qué coño le hiciste, Martin?

He found Isabelle at the catering tent, and that told him everything he needed to know, because Isabelle Vance didn’t eat craft services. In six weeks of production, he’d never seen her touch anything that wasn’t bottled water or black coffee from her own thermos. White pantsuits, perfect posture, a studio VP who made directors nervous. But here she was, standing in front of the fruit display with her back to Martin’s trailer, watching the set just as Stefan had been watching it.

“How long are you going to stand here pretending to pick out a banana while he destroys her?” He kept his voice low, but the anger bled through.

“Lower your voice.” Isabelle didn’t look at him. “And don’t look at me. Look at the monitors.”

He turned toward the monitors, voice tight. “She’s falling apart. This is exactly what he did to Stasia. Same pattern. And the whole crew is pretending they don't see it.”

“I know exactly where we are on the clock, Stefan.” Isabelle picked up her coffee, her gaze fixed on the screen where Martin was stepping into Erika’s personal space. “The Stasia Larke NDA expires in forty-eight hours.”

The number hit him. Two days.

“Forty-eight hours and she goes on record,” Isabelle continued, her voice low, controlled. “The documentation is ready. The journalists are briefed. But until that clock hits zero, Martin still owns the narrative. If you move now—if you play the hero before that NDA is void—he’ll claim harassment, he’ll spike the film, and he’ll bury Stasia’s story before the world even hears it.”

Eight years. Stefan’s mind flashed to the storage room. Martin had kept that woman silent for a decade before he’d even bothered to make her sign the papers, and now they were down to the final forty-eight hours of a decade-long silence.

“And Erika?” he snapped. “What happens to her for the next two days?”

“We keep her safe. We keep her on set. And you don’t give him a single thing he can use.”

“She doesn’t have two days.”

“Then help me make sure she does.”

He looked across the set at Erika, at Martin circling her mark. Every instinct in him fought to cross that sand and put himself between them. He didn’t, because Isabelle was right. And the only way to protect her was to let her suffer.

His phone buzzed before he made it back to his mark. Alex.

“Page Eight just posted photos. You and Erika between the trailers—her hand on your chest, your hand on her jaw, foreheads practically touching.” Alex’s voice had the clipped, caffeinated edge of someone who'd been fielding calls since before dawn. “The trades want a comment. Two gossip sites have already called the office. And I've got a cable entertainment show camped in my voicemail acting like they’re owed a statement.”

Stefan closed his eyes. He knew exactly which moment they’d caught—the conversation where she'd almost told him something, and then didn’t.

“Give me something I can work with,” Alex said. “Because right now the narrative is ‘Stefan Cruz tanks his comeback over on-set romance,’ and I need a different story by noon.”

“I can’t,” Stefan said. “And I won’t.”