Page 115 of The Hollywood Switch-up

Erika wasn’t sure. She tried. Her legs held.

“We’re walking to your villa.” Lily took her elbow—gentle, but firm. “And you’re going to tell me everything. Not just today. All of it.”

“Lily, I can’t⁠—”

“Move now. Fall apart later.”

The walk to the villa took seven minutes. Lily kept her hand on Erika’s elbow and didn’t speak. Erika watched her own feet move against the path, trying to remember the last time someone had touched her without an angle.

The villa door stuck. Lily shouldered it open, steered her inside, and clicked it shut.

It was dim—she hadn’t touched the curtains in days. The charcoal-smeared pages were scattered where she’d kicked them, black streaks ground into white tile. Lily looked at the mess, then at Erika, and said nothing. She filled a glass at the kitchenette, pressed it into Erika’s hands. She dragged two chairs from the dining table and positioned them knee to knee.

They sat. Lily waited. The silence was different here than it had been at the generator.

“You heard what I said out there.” Erika’s voice was steadier than she expected. “The schedule. The way he talks to me. All of it sounded like—like nothing.”

“I heard it.”

“And you’re wondering why I don’t just—” She gestured at nothing. Fight back. Walk away. Be the person she used to be. “Why am I just taking the abuse?”

Lily held her gaze. “Yeah, chica. I am.”

Erika looked at the glass in her hands. She could keep the secret—swallow it like she’d been swallowing it, walk back out that door and survive until wrap and disappear. Or she could hand Lily the one thing that explained everything and trust her not to detonate it.

She chose.

“He knows about the switch.”

Lily didn’t move. Didn’t blink. But her eyes shifted—not surprise. Recognition.

“He called me into his office. He had photos. He laid it out like a business arrangement.” Erika’s hands were shaking and she let them shake because she was so tired of holding still. “He wanted something for his silence. He didn’t say what.” A breath that shuddered through her. “He didn’t have to.”

“How long?” Lily’s voice went careful.

“Since the office meeting.”

Lily's grip on her hands tightened, just slightly.

“I couldn’t tell you. If you knew, you’d act, and if you acted, Martin would reframe it—you’d become the problem, and he’d walk away clean the way he always walks away clean.”

Lily’s voice dropped lower. “That’s not your call to make.”

“I told him to go to hell and he started the next morning.” The words were coming out wrong—not chronological, not organized, just the pieces that hurt the most in the order they surfaced. “The call times. The script changes. The way he touches me during notes and it all looks professional. I can’t point to anything because there’s nothing to point to. And he—” She swallowed. “He knows there’s nothing to point to.”

Lily’s jaw was tight but her hands were steady on Erika’s, and that steadiness was the only thing keeping the room from spinning.

“If I say anything—if I go to anyone—he calls the studio. Expose the switch. Anneliese loses everything.” Her voice cracked on her sister’s name. “She’s finally getting better. Finally trying to be a person again instead of a brand. And I’m sitting here in her life, in her name, and if Martin picks up the phone, she’s done. Career over. While she’s still on crutches.”

“Erika—”

“And I’ve been pushing Stefan away because every time he gets close, Martin watches. I can see what it’s costing him. I can’t explain why and I can’t stop. And I⁠—”

She stopped. Her lungs wouldn’t give her anymore. She sat there with her mouth open, nothing coming out, Lily’s hands holding hers.

Lily sat with all of it for a long moment. Then, “You’ve been carrying all of this. Alone.”

Erika closed her eyes.