Page 151 of The Hollywood Switch-up

“Go get him, Bean.”

Anneliese took the passenger seat. Bradley folded himself into the back.

Erika didn’t wait. She floored it.

Bradley’s Castellan smelled like leather and expensive cologne, and she was currently sweating through emerald silk and crying tracks into her perfect foundation, but she genuinely did not care.

She took a corner too fast. Anneliese grabbed the door handle.

Sunset to the PCH, the city sliding past in amber and neon. She pushed through a yellow light at La Cienega, caught the 10 west, the air changed when the ocean got close. Salt came through the windows before she could see the water.

“We’re forty minutes from Malibu,” Bradley said from the back. “If he’s still packing, we’ve got a shot.”

“A shot?” The word came out smaller than she intended.

“You’re making it,” Anneliese said firmly. “Just drive.”

She drove.

The Pacific appeared on her left—she heard it before she saw it, waves breaking somewhere past the open windows. The road opened up. She pushed the Castellan harder.

Her hands were steady on the wheel. She noticed that. Three months of hands that shook at two a.m. Steady now. Both of them.

The Malibu hills rose ahead. Somewhere up there, Stefan was packing his life into suitcases.

Including me.

Thirty minutes. Maybe less if she kept pushing it. Maybe more if there was traffic on the hill. She didn’t know. She kept her foot down.

Anneliese’s hand found hers on the gearshift. Squeezed once. “Almost there, Bean.”

She didn’t slow down. Took the next curve with the Castellan hugging the road, the ocean a dark roar on her left, the hills rising on her right.

Please. She didn’t know who she was asking.

STEFAN

Through the town car window, the Malibu house came at him slowly—the long driveway, the dark facade, the quality of a place that had never become home arriving through glass at midnight.

His phone buzzed. “Yeah?”

“Are you sure you want to take off tonight?”

Nada. No queda nada. “The cameras got what they wanted,” he said. “So did she.”

Erika’s eyes in the corridor. That final flicker of forgiveness and underneath it something he recognized from a hundred performances—a decision made and lived with. He’d never played that look honestly. He knew that now.

Mierda.

“Okay. Three hours.”

He ended the call and got out of the car.

Inside, the house received him the way it always had—with the silence of a space that had never been filled with anything. Not music, not cooking smells, not the sound of another person moving through rooms. Three years here and the place still felt like a location scout had dressed it.

He’d never carved a corner of this place into something alive.

He dropped his bag by the door. Pulled out his phone. The photo was still there—Erika on the yacht, hair wild from the wind, laughing at something he’d said. He looked at it for longer than he should have. Then put the phone facedown on the couch.