Page 132 of The Hollywood Switch-up

A golf cart skidded to a stop outside. Crutches on concrete. And a voice—sharp, ragged, cutting through everything else in the room:

“Where is she? Where’s my sister?”

Anneliese Morgan appeared in the doorway with her leg in a white cast and Bradley Smart behind her steadying her elbow, straight from the airstrip in yesterday’s clothes with mascara streaked down her cheeks, looking nothing like the polished star the world knew and everything like a woman who’d just watched her twin get attacked from thirty thousand feet and couldn’t get there fast enough.

Her eyes swept the room—the rotting walls, the overturned furniture, the security guards, Stefan standing alone with blood on his knuckles—and found Erika. Sitting up against Lily, face pale and bruised and streaked with tears.

Anneliese made a sound that didn't belong anywhere near a red carpet or a press junket something between a scream and a sob.

Her crutches clattered to the ground and she half-fell, half-lunged toward her sister, and Bradley caught her and helped her the last steps, and then she was on her knees beside Erika with trembling hands cupping her face and her forehead pressed to her twin’s forehead—a gesture so practiced, so instinctive, it could only belong to them.

“I’m here, Bean.” Her voice cracked. “Annie’s here. I’ve got you.”

And Erika broke.

Stefan watched her face crumple against Anneliese’s shoulder. He heard that sob—raw, wrecked, and bottomless. Her sobs tore through him worse than the sharp pain of his own knuckles. He couldn’t do anything about it.

He remembered her hand over his heart on the yacht, counting his heartbeat. He remembered Promise? in the dark. He remembered the weight of her against his chest when she fell asleep and how he’d stayed awake just to feel her breath. He would hear that sound for the rest of his life.

“Annie.” Her voice was muffled against Anneliese’s shoulder. Strangled. “I want to go home. Please. I want to go home.”

“I know, Bean.” Anneliese pressed her lips to Erika’s hair, tears streaming down both their faces. “I know. We’re going. I’m taking you home.”

Bradley’s voice cut through the room. “She’s not talking to anyone. We’re leaving. Now.”

Bradley helped Erika to her feet. She swayed, leaning heavily on him and Lily, and Anneliese retrieved her crutches and positioned herself on Erika’s other side, and the four of them moved toward the entrance—Erika in the center, held up by everyone except him.

Anneliese stopped at the doorway, turned, and found Stefan across the room, and her face did something he would never forget—the grief still there, the tears still wet on her cheeks, but her eyes going flat and hard and still.

“This is on you.”

She was right. Not about Martin, Martin was Martin’s fault. But he’d had the warning and the time and the chance to get her out and instead he’d fallen asleep, and Anneliese was right, and he would carry those four words next to the two he’d whispered to an unconscious woman for as long as he lived.

Lily caught his eye from across the room. “Security found Lena. She confessed: Martin threatened her sister. Told her he’d destroy her career and her family if she didn’t cooperate.” Her voice was flat. “She’s been trying to protect Erika all along. The coffee. The office interruption. All of it.”

Erika held his gaze for one more second and then she turned and followed her sister into the morning light and the canvas fell shut behind them.

Stefan stood in the ruined bar. Blood drying on his hands. The phone on the floor with its screen gone dark. He could hear the golf cart starting outside and voices and the sound of people leaving and then there was nothing—just the waves through the walls and the rot-smell and the stain on the concrete where she’d been lying when he found her.

He sat on the damp floorboards where she’d lain, and put his head in his bloody hands, and let himself break.

STEFAN

Stefan killed the engine but didn’t move. The podcast hosts’ voices still rattled through his speakers—some true-crime duo dissecting Erika’s trauma as entertainment—and he jabbed the power button before he could hear whatever came next.

The silence was worse. He sat with his knuckles white on the steering wheel and made himself stay in it.

The hard drive on the passenger seat caught the light, a black rectangle that held enough ruin to bring down an empire. Or enough to bury him trying.

Fifty-six days since the island. Fifty-six nights waking in the dark, arm stretched across empty sheets. The smell of clean cotton warmed by the sun. Her voice when she whispered, “You came.”

And her face the last time he saw her. Closed against him. Her hand shoving his chest, not hard, but final. A push that said this is where we end.

“Don’t touch me.”

Three words. They played on a loop in his skull. Every night he whispered the same prayer into the dark: Perdóname, Princesa . . . Perdóname.

Two months of watching the studio cover for him, watching Erika’s name dragged through comment sections while she went silent, waiting for someone with more courage than he had, someone who wasn't afraid of what speaking up would cost them.