Page 152 of The Hollywood Switch-up

The salt air came through the open window. He closed his eyes and let it go. Almost. Almost free.

In the garage, he paused by his suitcase. Tomorrow. Cudillero. Olive groves. The smell of simmering sofrito. Pronto, mamá. Ya voy. Tomorrow he’d step back into the skin of Stefan Herrera, not the hollow idol called Stefan Cruz.

He carried the suitcase to the front door. Crossing back through the living room, he noticed the crystal glass on the bar cart, the one he’d never used in three years. He almost laughed. Of course. Of all the nights.

He poured the whiskey. Turned to the floor-to-ceiling window.

Outside, the Pacific stretched toward the horizon. He’d been looking at it for three years and tonight was the first time it had felt like a direction rather than a backdrop.

The whiskey burned. And then her voice arrived without warning—no cue, no mark, no director calling action, just the thing itself landing in his chest the way real pain always did.

“I forgive you, but I can’t trust this.”

Maldita sea.

“Stefan?”

He turned. Bradley Smart stood in the doorway, still in his premiere suit.

“Brad. What are you doing here?”

“You left the door unlocked.” He stepped inside. “Rookie move for a guy who ducked out of his own premiere.”

Stefan set the glass down. “I’m not worried about the paparazzi.”

“Right.” Bradley looked at him for a moment. “She drove out here. Premiere dress, the whole thing.”

Stefan went still.

“She’s on the beach.” Bradley’s voice was even.

“Erika?” The word came out before he could stop it. “She’s actually—she’s here?”

“Yeah.” Bradley held his gaze. “She’s here.”

Why? The question arrived before anything else—not the logistics of how, not the timeline, just the single unanswerable thing. She’d said she couldn’t. She’d meant it. He’d watched her mean it. Why would she come after that?

“Good luck, man.” Bradley was already backing toward the door.

Stefan stood in the empty living room with the whiskey glass on the counter and the Pacific through the window and the silence of a house that was about to stop being the last place he’d ever stood before leaving.

He put the glass down. Picked it up. Put it down.

Then he went.

The steps from the porch to the beach were broad stone, salt-pitted at the edges. Stefan noticed them. The salt wind hit his face before he reached the sand—brine and cold and the smell of the Pacific at low tide.

He saw the lanterns first.

Fifty flames behind hurricane glass, spilling warm light onto wet sand in a ring. The dress caught the light—emerald silk gone dark where the surf had reached the hem, and she was standing inside all of it, facing the water.

Dios. Mírate. Lanterns on the sand. His voice on his father’s song. The night she’d stopped being someone he was acting opposite and started being the thing he couldn’t look away from. She’d recreated it. For him.

“Erika.”

She turned. He’d been imagining her face for three months—in crowds, in afternoon light, in his sleep—and he’d gotten it wrong every time. Not wrong in the details. Wrong in the quality of it. The real version was always more exact than the imagined one.

She’d been crying. The mascara tracked down her cheeks in lines she hadn’t bothered to fix, and her chin was up, and her eyes had the set of someone who’d decided something and meant to say it regardless of what came after.