Page 149 of The Hollywood Switch-up

“Is there a difference?”

“I don’t know anymore.” He looked at her steadily. “You’re not afraid of what I represent anymore. Anneliese’s enemy. The trap. Three months ago, you would have been managing this conversation. You’re not.”

She didn’t confirm it. Didn’t deny it either. “What happens next time something breaks? Because something always breaks. I’ve spent three months learning how to be a person without someone else’s crisis at the center of it. I’m not the same person who went to that island.”

“I know.” He said it like he meant it, not like he was agreeing to end the conversation.

“Then you know why I can’t do this yet.” She kept her voice level. “It’s not about trusting you. It’s trusting myself, that I won’t lose myself in you again. I’m still figuring out who I am when I’m not being someone’s other half. And I’m terrified that if I let you in before I know that, I’ll disappear again. Into you. Into us. Into whatever shape I need to be to make this work.”

He was quiet for a long moment.

“I know what you did,” she said. “The files, the evidence, all of it. And I forgive you for the silence, for all of it. But forgiveness isn’t the same as being ready.”

“I didn’t come here expecting anything different.” He said it without self-pity. “I came because you deserved to hear it from me. That I love you. That I know what I got wrong.”

“What did you get wrong?” She asked it genuinely—not as a test, just because she wanted to hear him say it.

“Every time it got hard, I found a reason it wasn’t my fight. The day I figured out what Martin was doing, I should have told you. Instead of taking you to dinner and hoping someone else would handle it.” He exhaled. “All of it. Every time I chose easy over right, you paid for it.”

She nodded slowly. That was the truth of it. The whole shape of it, finally named.

“There’s a jet tonight. I’m going to Cudillero.” He reached toward her, stopped. Let his hand drop. “I just needed you to know. Even if it doesn’t change anything.” His voice dropped. “Te amo, Erika. Even if you can’t love me back.”

She stood there for one more second, just one, with three months of silence and everything they’d just said and all the things she still couldn’t say yet sitting in the space between them.

She turned away before she could change her mind. Her heels on the marble floor, each step taking her further from something she wasn’t sure she could afford to want yet.

At the end of the corridor, Anneliese was there—not moving toward her, not intercepting, just present. She’d been waiting. She took one look at Erika’s face and didn’t ask.

She just held out her hand.

Erika took it and they went in together.

The theater was already dimming when they found their seats—Anneliese on one side, Bradley on the other, Lily slipping in from somewhere next to Erika and taking her hand without a word.

His name appeared first—STEFAN CRUZ—and she made herself look at it like a composition. Weight and balance. Negative space. Nothing more. Then hers: And introducing ERIKA MORGAN. Gold text on black. Scattered applause. They didn’t know who she was yet.

For the next two hours she watched herself move across the screen like she was watching someone else. The lighting was beautiful—golden hour on the beach, the kind of warmth she’d mix with cadmium yellow and burnt sienna, blue shadows in the club scene cut with ultramarine gray. She’d never noticed during filming. Now she couldn’t stop noticing.

The final scene faded. She was already reaching for her purse when the screen didn’t go dark.

Footage. Raw, behind-the-scenes—the kind of B-roll that played at wrap parties, not premieres. Someone had authorized this. Someone who knew what was in it.

The jet-ski sequence. Early in filming, before anything had happened, before Martin, before the statement, before any of it. And there was Stefan, and he was looking at her.

Not at the camera. Not at the horizon. At her.

She didn’t move toward the exit immediately. Just sat there and let her artist’s eye do what it always did—read the frame, assess the composition, figure out what the camera had caught that the subject hadn’t known it was catching. The angle was slightly behind and to his left. He wouldn’t have known he was shot.

His hands were very still. She'd drawn those hands. Spent too long on the knuckles, the veins, the way tendons shifted when he turned a page. Told herself it was a craft. Artist's eye. Just a study.

She stood up. Not a decision. Her body was moving before she’d caught up with why.

More footage. Different weeks, different setups, and in every frame the same thing—Stefan at an angle he wouldn’t have noticed, his attention on a point just off-camera that was, she understood now, wherever she was standing. The angles were the ones she’d drawn. The light falling across his face was the light she’d been chasing with her pencil at two a.m. in a villa she’d told herself she was just borrowing.

She’d known. The anger arrived first—hot and specific, directed entirely at herself. She’d known and she’d drawn every page of it and called it observation and let herself disappear into Martin’s production and Stefan’s silence and three months of recovery and never once admitted that the sketchbook full of his face was the most honest thing she’d produced in years.

She reached the exit door. Pushed it open an inch.