Page 122 of The Hollywood Switch-up

“His team moved fast. Too fast.” Olivia’s voice hardened. “Like they had it drafted and ready. Like someone told them it was coming.”

Erika looked at Stefan. His face was white.

“I have to go,” she said. “Tell Annie I’m coming. Tell her I’ll fix this.”

She didn’t know how. But she said it because it was the only thing she could do—make a promise to her sister and figure out the rest later.

She ended the call and turned to face him. Six feet of deck between them. Neither of them moved.

“I didn’t know.” His voice was hoarse. “Erika, I swear—I didn’t know about that statement. I didn’t authorize it. Alex must have—when the podcast dropped and I wasn’t answering⁠—”

He was shaking. She could see it in his hands, the same hands that had held her face last night, and a part of her—the part that was still lying in the dark cabin listening to his heartbeat—wanted to believe him.

She didn’t move.

“You knew about the switch for weeks. You knew, and you told Isabelle, and your team had a statement drafted, polished, and sent in two hours.” She kept her voice level because if she let it crack, she’d either scream or collapse and she wasn’t going to give him either. “That’s not a panic response, Stefan. That’s a plan. And the plan was to make Annie the villain.”

“That’s not—Erika, Martin leaked this. Martin has been⁠—”

“Martin’s name isn’t on that statement, Stefan. Yours is.”

He flinched.

And she was looking at him—at the flinch, at the wet in his eyes, at the man who’d said te amo twelve hours ago with her face in his hands—and she was also looking at the phone in her hand where his name sat above the words erratic and unprofessional next to her sister’s name, and those two things could not exist in the same person, they couldn’t. She’d been turning them over and over since she read it and they would not fit.

“Escúchame, please—just let me⁠—”

“In English, Stefan.”

It wasn’t that she didn’t understand. She’d heard enough of his Spanish by now—te amo, aquí, hermosa, the language of the dark cabin and the promise and the way his voice sounded when he forgot to perform. She couldn’t let those sounds into the same air as this conversation or she’d break.

She watched his jaw work. Watched his eyes go glassy. He was already reaching for his phone. “I’ll call Alex. Right now. I’ll retract the statement, I’ll⁠—”

“The first story is the only story. Headlines stick. Corrections get buried.” She said it quietly. “This is the version of us that exists now.”

He stopped dialing. Looked at her. “What do you need? Just tell me and I’ll⁠—”

“There’s nothing.” She could feel something shutting down inside her chest, some essential thing going dark like a building losing power floor by floor. “Annie’s career is on fire and your name lit the match and it doesn’t matter if you were holding it or someone handed it to you. She’s still burning. You made me look like an idiot . . . I fell in love with you. And your name is on that statement. Figure out how those two things are supposed to exist in the same world, because I can’t.”

She said it and watched it land and felt nothing. That was the worst part. She’d expected rage or grief or satisfaction and instead there was just absence—the place where trust used to be, scraped out and hollow.

“I want off this yacht.”

“The captain said the currents⁠—”

“Now, Stefan.”

He opened his mouth. Closed it. Nodded.

She walked toward the cabin stairs without looking back, and behind her she heard him pick up his phone and dial and say “Alex, what the fuck did you do” in a voice she’d never heard from him before—raw and shaking and furious—and her feet stuttered on the stairs, just for a second, just one half-step where her body tried to turn around before she told it not to, and then she kept walking because it didn’t matter, because knowing or not knowing didn’t unburn what was already ash, and her sister was somewhere with lawyers and Erika was on a yacht in a salt-stiff sundress and the man behind her was either a liar or a fool and she couldn’t afford to find out which because Anneliese needed her and that was the only thing she was sure of anymore.

ERIKA

She locked the cabin door and sat on the bed and listened to him stand on the other side of it for a long time before his footsteps moved away.

She didn’t come out Saturday. Didn’t come out Sunday. She lay in the dark with the lock between them and the cabin exactly as they’d left it—his jacket draped over the chair, the sheets tangled from that morning, his cologne clinging to the pillows—and every detail was evidence of something she couldn’t look at directly.

He knocked. She stared at the ceiling.