38. Erika
ERIKA
The next morning came too fast—four hours of sleep, concealer over the evidence, coffee she couldn’t taste. She was halfway across the lot, running lines in her head and almost believing she could keep the mask from slipping for another twelve hours, when it hit.
The set had gone quiet. Not between-takes quiet—the other kind. The kind that meant everyone had found the same thing on their phones at the same time.
The makeup artist caught her eye as she passed.
Looked away fast, but not before Erika saw it—pity, the kind people wear when they know something about you that you haven’t learned yet.
She was already reaching for her phone when the headline loaded—Page Eight: EXCLUSIVE—Bradley Smart Photos Raise Questions About Morgan’s Whereabouts—and beneath it, #TwoAnnelieses, trending.
Fuck.
She scrolled without breathing. Side-by-side photos—Anneliese on the set in the Bahamas, looking “vulnerable” in a sundress, and a grainy shot of Anneliese in oversized sunglasses outside the Malibu clinic, timestamps twelve minutes apart.
Martin was watching from the monitors. Phone to his ear, eyes on her, and when she looked up, he didn’t smile. Didn’t need to. He just held her gaze for a beat longer than necessary, then turned back to his call.
That was worse than the smile. Anneliese’s name was on her screen before she’d made it off the sand. She declined it, kept walking, and was inside her villa with the door locked before she called back.
Anneliese answered on the first ring. Hair perfect, makeup perfect, eyes absolutely furious.
“How bad is it on your end?”
“The set went silent when I walked on. So. Pretty bad.”
“Bradley and I took separate cars. Separate flights. I made him wait forty minutes before leaving the restaurant so we wouldn’t be photographed together.” Anneliese was flat and precise. “So someone explain to me how Page Eight has side-by-side timestamps twelve minutes apart.”
“Has Olivia seen it?”
“Olivia’s been on the phone with Page Eight’s editor since six a.m.” Anneliese leaned closer to the camera. “But that’s not why I’m calling.”
She knew what was coming before Anneliese said it.
“I watched the behind-the-scenes footage they posted yesterday. The rooftop scene.” A pause—surgical, deliberate.
“I’ve done a hundred press junkets, Erika.
I’ve watched every interview Stefan Cruz has ever given.
I know what he looks like when he’s performing and I know what he looks like when he’s not.
And in that footage, he is not performing. ”
“Martin pushed us to do seven takes. He wanted raw, he got raw. That’s the job.”
“The job doesn’t explain the way you leaned into him after the cut was called.”
The ocean through the villa wall, her sister breathing on the other end, nothing else.
"Is it still just sleeping with him? Or is it more than that now?"
“Anneliese—”
“Don’t. I already know the answer, I watched the footage. I just need to know how bad this actually is before it becomes everyone’s problem.”
“You’ve spent the last two years telling every reporter in town he’s the worst person in Hollywood. You don’t get to tell me who he actually is.” It came out sharper than she intended. Or maybe exactly as sharp as she intended.
“I’m not telling you who he is. I’m telling you what happens when this gets out. It’s not just your heart, Erika, it’s the switch. It’s the entire production. It’s my career and yours and his—”
“Your career?” Erika heard her own voice go cold.
“I’m here because you asked me to be here.
I left my life, my painting, the tiny bit of space I’d managed to carve out for myself—I am lying to everyone on this set every single day because you needed someone to cover for you.
So don’t call me from your perfect apartment with your perfect hair and tell me I’m the one putting this at risk. ”
The silence that followed was worse than the yelling.
Anneliese’s jaw was tight. Her eyes were bright. For a moment she looked exactly like Erika felt—terrified and furious and holding it together with her fingernails.
“It's more than that now.” Erika said it. Looking right at her sister’s face—finally not lying to it. “But that’s not what the footage proves. It just proves we're bad at hiding it.”
Anneliese stared at her. “Olivia will call you within the hour. Whatever she tells you to say, say it exactly.”
“I know how to stick to a script, Anneliese.”
“Then stick to this one.” Her voice had steadied but her hands hadn’t. “Because if this falls apart, I can’t protect you. I won’t be able to protect either of us.”
Anneliese ended the call, and Erika set the phone face-down on the nightstand and pressed her palms flat against her knees. She couldn’t explain that yet. Not until she knew what she was going to do about it.
Olivia called before Erika had set the phone down. No greeting—clipped, moving fast.
“The studio’s legal team has been on me since six.
Breach of contract is on the table, so listen carefully.
The official position is that the timestamp is doctored.
Tabloids manipulate metadata constantly—we’re pushing that hard with Page Eight’s editor and it’ll hold long enough to get through the next forty-eight hours.
When anyone asks—and they will ask—you were here.
All day. The photo is fake, old, or both. Say it back to me.”
“The photo is fake, old, or both.”
“Good. I’m releasing a statement in ten minutes. Until then, you talk to no one. Not the crew, not Martin, not Stefan. Especially not Stefan—that behind-the-scenes footage is getting traction and the last thing we need is the two of you giving anyone else something to screenshot.”
Erika closed her eyes. So Olivia had seen the footage too. Of course she had. Everyone had.
“I need you to be present and professional and boring today, Erika. Can you give me something boring?”
“Boring was my entire life before this job.”
“Then lean into it. We’ll get through this. But I need you airtight.”
The call ended, and the villa went still around her. She sat with the phone in her lap and Olivia’s voice in her head—especially not Stefan.
A knock. She opened the door expecting a PA with script changes.
Stefan. Still in yesterday’s clothes, hair wrecked, and she knew before he spoke that he’d been awake as long as she had.
“Don’t—” She held up a hand before he could step inside. “Olivia said not to talk to anyone. Especially you. The footage is getting traction and if someone sees you walking into my villa—”
He looked at her hand like it was the most ridiculous thing he’d ever seen, stepped past it, and closed the door behind him.
“Olivia can manage the press. I’m not here to talk about the press.”
“That’s not what this is about—”
“This morning you told me you were fine and I let you lie to me. On set, you flinched when I touched you and I didn’t push. I have done everything you’ve asked.” He stood in the middle of her villa, not touching her, not moving closer. “And you are getting worse.”
She didn’t have a deflection for that. He wasn’t asking a question. He wasn’t offering comfort. He was stating what he saw, and he was right, and she hated him a little for it.
“Tell me one true thing,” he said. “Not about the article. Not about Olivia. One thing that’s actually happening with you right now, and I’ll leave.”
Martin left a photograph in my room. He's been watching us. He owns me and he's making sure I know it.
She couldn’t say any of it. Not with Olivia’s instructions in her ear, not with Anneliese’s fury still lodged in her throat, not with Martin’s leash pulling tighter every hour.
But Stefan was standing three feet away looking at her like he’d wait all day, and the distance between them was killing her faster than the secret.
“I’m scared.” Two words. The truest thing she’d said to anyone since the photo appeared. “Not of the article. Of something I can’t tell you about yet. And I know that’s not enough, and I know you deserve more than that, but it’s what I have right now.”
He was quiet for a long time. She watched him work through it—the part of him that wanted to push.
“Yet,” he said finally.
“Yet?” She looked at him.
“You said yet. Can’t tell me yet.” His face shifted—not relief, not satisfaction. Recognition. “I can work with yet.”
He crossed to her then—slowly, giving her time. His hand came up and rested against the side of her neck, thumb on her jaw, and she let herself press into it. His skin warm against hers and his pulse steady under her fingers where they’d found his wrist without her deciding to reach for him.
“I know,” she said.
“Good.” He looked at her for one more beat, then stepped back. “Go be boring for Olivia. I’ll stay here for five minutes so nobody sees us leave together.”
She almost smiled. Almost. “You heard that?”
“Thin walls.” The ghost of a grin—the first crack in the tension since he’d walked in. “Go—I’ll be the guy who definitely wasn’t in your villa.”
She picked up her script, and walked out into the sun. She was halfway to set before she realized her hands had stopped shaking.