Page 150 of The Hollywood Switch-up

She stopped. Couldn’t move.

Week one. Week two. Week three. And in every frame he was already looking at her like that, and she’d been looking back with a pencil in her hand and calling it art, and she’d walked away from him two hours ago and told herself she wasn’t ready.

“What are you still doing here?” Lily’s voice, low and fierce, right at her ear. “Go.”

Erika pushed through the double doors back into the lobby. Lily was already gone—peeled off toward the valet. Anneliese and Bradley were on their feet, and what Erika caught in the half-second before anyone spoke was the quality of Anneliese’s face—the way she started to arrange it into something, the performance beginning to assemble itself, and then stopped. What was underneath was quieter. More real.

“Eri—”

“I’m going after him.” Steady. “Where is he?”

Anneliese’s hands found hers, and for once there was nothing performed in it—just her sister, holding on the way she used to before either of them learned how not to.

One second. Then Anneliese released her.

“There’s my sister.”

Erika looked at her—at the face she’d been reading for twenty-six years, at the quieter thing underneath, more Anneliese than anything she’d seen in months.

“Don’t push it,” she said.

Anneliese almost smiled. “You know this is the plot of every romantic comedy you’ve ever made fun of.”

“Don’t.” A beat. “I’m still going.”

“Obviously.”

Then Erika turned to Bradley.

“Malibu,” he said. “24847 Pacific Coast Highway. He mentioned it after the screening. Said he was going home to pack.”

Everything else dropped away. Just the address and the distance between here and there.

She looked at Anneliese. Anneliese looked back—reading her face the way she always had, knowing what was coming, already stepping aside.

“I’ll call a car,” Anneliese started.

“No time.” She held out her hand to Bradley. “Keys.”

He blinked. Grinned, dropping them into her palm. The keys were heavier than she expected. Solid. Her fingers closed around them.

Premiere dress. Borrowed car. PCH at midnight. Either the most romantic thing she’d ever done or the most idiotic. The ending would determine which.

They moved through the lobby—the three of them cutting through the premiere crowd in formal wear with somewhere to be. The noise of the crowd, the classical music, the flash of someone’s camera as they passed—all of it registering as background while she moved through it with the keys already in her hand, the address already in her head, the distance between here and there already being calculated in some part of her that had stopped asking permission.

Lily was at the valet stand with the Castellan already waiting. She looked at Erika—one look, the one that meant she’d already understood everything—and squeezed her arm.

“I saw your face when you came out of that corridor.” A beat. “Go.”

Erika pulled her into a hug, fast and fierce. “Thank you.”

Lily held on for one extra second. Then stepped back. “Don’t overthink it. Just drive.”

Anneliese appeared at her shoulder. “If you get that dress wet,” she said, “I’m never speaking to you again.”

The laugh arrived before Erika could shape it into anything—not the dark kind, not the defensive kind, just a laugh. She heard it come out of her and didn’t recognize it immediately and then did.

Anneliese’s hands found the dress, straightening a fold at the hip. Then she stepped back. Her eyes were bright.