45. Erika
ERIKA
Erika stood there with sand in her shoes and the sunrise turning everything gold behind her, and she understood exactly what had happened.
“An hour ago,” she said.
Lena’s eyes slid past her shoulder. “Didn’t anyone tell you?”
She headed back to her villa without running, because if she ran, he’d know it worked. She couldn’t control the call times or the notes or the hand digging into her shoulder. But she could control the speed of her own feet on a path. Right now, that was enough.
The note was waiting on the kitchenette counter:
Good girl. You show up when I tell you to. Now you’re learning.—M
She crumpled it in her fist and stood at the counter and watched the sun finish rising through the window, and her coffee went cold while she held Martin's note in her hand and wondered how many more mornings she had left in her.
After lunch she was in the makeup chair, and that’s when they handed her the revised pages for Scene 48.
The old version had Luna crying alone in her hotel room—contained, private, a single close-up. The new version put her under a cold shower, stripped bare, breaking for the camera. Martin had scrawled in the margin: Luna is stripped bare emotionally and physically. I want to see everything.
She read it twice. Folded the pages. Put them in her bag. She survived the day. Hit her marks. Avoided Stefan’s eyes.
The next morning brought another false call and another note. By the time she reached the set, she’d gone permanently numb. And she understood what Martin wanted—not just her obedience but her submission—the slow erasure of the person inside the performance.
They were blocking Scene 52 when Martin caught her attention and tilted his head toward the beach, and she followed because following was what she did now.
He walked her past the equipment trucks, past the PAs, until the crew noise faded and it was just the two of them and the ocean. He didn’t touch her. He didn’t have to.
“You were extraordinary yesterday.” He said it like he meant it—warm, almost gentle, the mentor voice he’d spent thirty years building.
“Take six. The way your hands were shaking—that wasn’t Luna, that was something real.
Something you’ve been carrying.” He glanced at her.
“I see it, you know. The weight. I don’t think anyone else on this set understands what you’re doing, but I do. ”
She said nothing. The ocean went on behind him, indifferent.
“You remind me of another actress I worked with years ago.” He said it casually, like a man thinking aloud.
“Same instinct. Same refusal to protect yourself on camera. She gave me the best performance of her career—take eleven. She was furious with me by then.” A quiet laugh.
“They always are. And then they watch the dailies and they understand.”
He let the silence sit. Then, lighter: “How are you sleeping?”
“Fine.”
“You’re not.” Said with concern. “I can see it in your face at call time. The exhaustion reads on camera. Which I can use, honestly. Luna should look exhausted. But I need you to take care of yourself.” He paused. “Are you eating?”
She looked past him at the horizon and went cold. He was right. She wasn’t sleeping, she wasn’t eating. He knew it like he knew everything, because he was the reason. And he was standing here asking about it.
“I’ve asked Lena to adjust your schedule.
Lighter days when you need them. I want you to feel supported.
” His hand came up—she braced—but he only gestured at the set behind them.
“This should feel collaborative, not adversarial. We’re making something extraordinary here, Anneliese. I need you to trust the process.”
Trust the process. She stood on that beach and listened to the man who sent her false call times and rewrote her scenes to strip her naked tell her to trust the process, and the worst part wasn’t the rage or the fear—it was the flicker, the half-second where his voice sounded so reasonable that she almost believed him.
This was how it worked. One reasonable conversation at a time until you couldn’t remember which parts were real and which parts he’d built around you.
“Get some rest tonight.” He checked his watch. “Early start tomorrow.”
At some point, her legs folded. She was sitting behind a generator, sand in her shoes, arms wrapped around her knees. She didn’t remember walking here. The sun had moved. The shadows were longer and bluer now.
“Erika.”
Lily’s face, close. Hands on her shoulders.
She didn’t know how long she’d been sitting here. The sand had gone cold underneath her and her arms ached from holding her knees, and Lily was crouching in front of her with an expression Erika had never seen on her before—not concern, not anger, something past both.
“What did he do?”
“Nothing.” The word came out flat and she meant it and she didn’t. “He told me I was extraordinary. He asked if I was sleeping. He offered to adjust my schedule. He rewrote my scene into a shower scene and then walked me down to the beach and told me he wanted me to feel supported.”
Lily’s grip tightened on her shoulders.
“He didn’t threaten me. He didn’t touch me. He just stood there being—” She couldn’t find the word. “And I know how that sounds. I know I’m sitting behind a generator because a man asked me how I was sleeping and that sounds—”
“Chica.” Lily’s voice was low, steady, furious. “You’re shaking. That’s not nothing.”
“You’re not hearing me.” Erika’s voice cracked. “If I try to tell anyone—he was being nice, Lily. He was a good director. And I can’t—I don’t know how to explain why it feels like—” She stopped. She didn’t have the end of the sentence. That was the whole problem.
“I’m not looking at you like you’re crazy.” Lily glanced over her shoulder, then back. “Can you stand?”
Erika wasn’t sure. She tried. Her legs held.
“We’re walking to your villa.” Lily took her elbow—gentle, but firm. “And you’re going to tell me everything. Not just today. All of it.”
“Lily, I can’t—”
“Move now. Fall apart later.”
The walk to the villa took seven minutes. Lily kept her hand on Erika’s elbow and didn’t speak. Erika watched her own feet move against the path, trying to remember the last time someone had touched her without an angle.
The villa door stuck. Lily shouldered it open, steered her inside, and clicked it shut.
It was dim—she hadn’t touched the curtains in days.
The charcoal-smeared pages were scattered where she’d kicked them, black streaks ground into white tile.
Lily looked at the mess, then at Erika, and said nothing.
She filled a glass at the kitchenette, pressed it into Erika’s hands.
She dragged two chairs from the dining table and positioned them knee to knee.
They sat. Lily waited. The silence was different here than it had been at the generator.
“You heard what I said out there.” Erika’s voice was steadier than she expected. “The schedule. The way he talks to me. All of it sounded like—like nothing.”
“I heard it.”
“And you’re wondering why I don’t just—” She gestured at nothing. Fight back. Walk away. Be the person she used to be. “Why am I just taking the abuse?”
Lily held her gaze. “Yeah, chica. I am.”
Erika looked at the glass in her hands. She could keep the secret—swallow it like she’d been swallowing it, walk back out that door and survive until wrap and disappear. Or she could hand Lily the one thing that explained everything and trust her not to detonate it.
She chose.
“He knows about the switch.”
Lily didn’t move. Didn’t blink. But her eyes shifted—not surprise. Recognition.
“He called me into his office. He had photos. He laid it out like a business arrangement.” Erika’s hands were shaking and she let them shake because she was so tired of holding still.
“He wanted something for his silence. He didn’t say what.
” A breath that shuddered through her. “He didn’t have to. ”
“How long?” Lily’s voice went careful.
“Since the office meeting.”
Lily's grip on her hands tightened, just slightly.
“I couldn’t tell you. If you knew, you’d act, and if you acted, Martin would reframe it—you’d become the problem, and he’d walk away clean the way he always walks away clean.”
Lily’s voice dropped lower. “That’s not your call to make.”
“I told him to go to hell and he started the next morning.” The words were coming out wrong—not chronological, not organized, just the pieces that hurt the most in the order they surfaced.
“The call times. The script changes. The way he touches me during notes and it all looks professional. I can’t point to anything because there’s nothing to point to.
And he—” She swallowed. “He knows there’s nothing to point to. ”
Lily’s jaw was tight but her hands were steady on Erika’s, and that steadiness was the only thing keeping the room from spinning.
“If I say anything—if I go to anyone—he calls the studio. Expose the switch. Anneliese loses everything.” Her voice cracked on her sister’s name.
“She’s finally getting better. Finally trying to be a person again instead of a brand.
And I’m sitting here in her life, in her name, and if Martin picks up the phone, she’s done.
Career over. While she’s still on crutches. ”
“Erika—”
“And I’ve been pushing Stefan away because every time he gets close, Martin watches. I can see what it’s costing him. I can’t explain why and I can’t stop. And I—”
She stopped. Her lungs wouldn’t give her anymore. She sat there with her mouth open, nothing coming out, Lily’s hands holding hers.
Lily sat with all of it for a long moment. Then, “You’ve been carrying all of this. Alone.”
Erika closed her eyes.
“Okay.” Lily’s voice was careful. “So Martin has the switch. He has the photos. And right now, the only thing stopping him from calling the studio is that you’re doing what he wants.”
“Yes.”
“And if you go to the studio yourself—get ahead of it—”
“Anneliese loses her career. The production shuts down. Everyone on this crew loses their job because I couldn’t keep my mouth shut.”
“That’s not on you.”
“It is, though.” Erika said it without heat.
Just the flat truth of it. “I’m the one who agreed to the switch.
I’m the one who’s here in her name. And if it comes out, I’m the one who lied to a studio and a hundred crew members and the man who—” She stopped.
“Martin knows that. He knows I can’t go to anyone without destroying Anneliese first.”
Lily leaned back in her chair. “Stefan.”
One word, and Erika felt her whole body go cold.
“No.”
“He’s been out of his mind trying to figure out what’s wrong with you. If he knew—”
“If he knew, he’d walk into Martin’s office and tear him apart and call it justice.
” Erika’s voice was steady and strange. “And Martin would love that, Lily. He’d reframe it—the volatile actor, the on-set incident, the production disrupted.
Stefan would become the story instead of Martin.
The switch would come out anyway. Anneliese would still lose everything.
Stefan would lose everything too. Because that’s what Martin does.
He makes the people who fight him into a problem. ”
“You don’t know—”
“I know exactly how it goes. I’ve been running it in my head every night.” She looked at Lily. “I get through the rest of the shoot, and then I go home. Anneliese comes back. Stefan gets his film. Nobody has to know.”
“And you?”
“I go back to the spare room and my sketchbooks and my life that nobody was paying attention to before any of this happened.” Her throat tightened. “That’s the plan.”
“That’s a terrible plan.”
“It’s the only one I’ve got.”
Lily looked at her for a long moment, and Lily’s eyes worked—not the fixer this time, not the woman who ran scenarios. Something quieter.
“You know what I think?” Lily’s voice was different now.
Softer. Which was almost worse. “I think you’ve been so scared of what happens if someone helps you that you’ve convinced yourself the only option is to suffer through it alone.
And I think that’s bullshit, chica. I think you’re the bravest person I know and also the most stubborn, and right now, those two things are working against each other. ”
Erika didn’t answer.
“Stefan came to me.” Lily said it straight, the way she said everything. “He’s got a way to get you off this island for a day. Private, somewhere Martin can’t reach you.”
Erika shook her head before Lily finished. “If Martin finds out—”
“Food poisoning. You’re back before anyone notices.” Lily’s hand found her shoulder. “You don’t have to tell Stefan the truth. But you need one day where you can breathe. One day.”
“I shouldn’t.”
“That’s not a no.”
Erika closed her eyes and thought about Stefan standing on the other side of her door that morning, his palm flat against the wood.
She thought about how tired she was—not the tired that sleep fixed but the tired that lived in her bones and made everything heavier—and she didn’t know if getting away from this place was going to change anything, but she knew she couldn’t survive another week of this.
“Okay.” Her voice was barely there. “Okay. Yes.”
Lily exhaled, and something like relief moved across her face—brief, real, gone.
“Get some sleep. I’ll handle the rest.”