Page 140 of The Hollywood Switch-up

Silk pillows on the bed. And in the corner, the half-finished canvas she’d brought back from the Bahamas set, started during a week-two afternoon when the light went gold and broke off the water. She hadn’t touched it since she got home. Couldn’t. Every time she looked at it, she saw the set, and every time she saw the set, she saw Martin, and her hands shook.

She lay back on the bed. The ceiling cracks she’d been tracing since she moved in, constellations she’d invented during the weeks she’d lain awake. They hadn’t changed. She had.

Stefan’s name is in it. He handed over evidence. He’s part of why the story broke.

The magazine was in her drawer where she’d shoved it days ago. She pulled it out, flipped to the article. There it was—Stefan Cruz. Complicit bystander. Witness who stayed silent. Eventually came forward with evidence. The article didn’t call him a hero. It called him what he was, a man who knew and said nothing until it was too late.

She set it down and looked up.

Her eyes went back to the Klimt. She lifted the print carefully off the wall and set it face-down on the bed beside her half-packed boxes. Not throwing it away. Just not looking at it.

STEFAN

Stefan had been in the booth for twenty minutes, fingers curled around a tumbler of Japanese whiskey he hadn’t touched, the sketchbook in his bag pressing against his side.

¿Qué estás haciendo aquí, Cruz?

Stefan had been asking himself that since he’d typed back I’ll be there before he could talk himself out of it. Three weeks since the Courier exposé. Three weeks of watching his career come apart one dropped endorsement at a time, one quietly canceled meeting at a time, one publicist who stopped returning calls at a time. He’d known the cost going in.

He heard the door before he saw her. Bradley Smart walked Anneliese in, then peeled off toward the bar without being asked. Stefan watched him go.

Anneliese crossed to his booth alone. Clutch pressed to the table. Fingers that wanted to flutter, held flat. She sat. Neither of them spoke.

The La-La Lounge filled the silence around them—low music, ice against glass, the ambient murmur of other people’s deals being made. Stefan let it sit. So did she. Two people who had said terrible things about each other in print for years, sitting in a dim booth at eight p.m. for the same reason, neither of them willing to be the first to say it out loud.

Then Anneliese said, “I’ve said a lot of things about you. Most of them to Erika.”

Stefan didn’t move.

“Which makes this”—she laughed, short and humorless—“probably the strangest meeting I’ve ever called.” She met his eyes for the first time. It wasn’t a question. “Did you mean it?”

He turned his glass in his hands. The amber caught the light.

“Every word.”

“What did you say to her?” Anneliese asked. “On the floor of that bar—what did you say when you finally got to her?”

Stefan went still. He remembered the bar, but his mind jumped further back, to the closed set.

“That I was sorry. That I’d failed her.” He set the glass down. “That I was there, even if it was too late.”

Anneliese’s breath caught. “And she pushed you away.”

“Like I was nothing.” His voice didn’t waver.

She was quiet for a moment. Not because she didn’t know what to say. Because she was deciding how much to give. “The statement. The one with your name on it.”

“I didn’t write it. Didn’t see it until Erika shoved it in my face on the yacht.” He exhaled. “My team went behind my back. And Martin made sure she saw it before I had the chance to explain.”

Anneliese studied him. He let her look, the same way he’d let Teagan look, because he was done performing and the only thing left was whatever she could see.

“I poisoned her against you before she ever met you,” Anneliese said. “Every headline. Every rumor. I handed her a version of you that made it impossible to trust what she was actually seeing.” She looked at the table. “So when that statement came out, she already had a file.”

“I gave you real material.” He said it flatly. “The Temmy comment. Years of it. You didn’t manufacture that.”

“No.” She didn’t look away. “But I amplified it. Specifically. Repeatedly. To the one person whose opinion of you I knew would matter eventually.” A beat. “I’m telling you because she deserves to know the full picture. Not because it lets either of us off the hook.”

The silence between them shifted—not comfortable, but honest.