46. Erika
ERIKA
The helicopter was already running when Lily walked her across the pad.
The noise was deafening, a physical thing pressing against her skull.
She climbed in because she’d said yes yesterday in her villa, and saying yes when the door was shut and the curtains were drawn was one thing, but actually getting into a helicopter while Martin expected her on set at dawn was something else entirely.
She’d told Lily she could do this. She was less sure now.
The seat belt clicked. Headphones clamped over her ears and the rotor’s thud dulled, and the ground fell away.
Erika watched the island shrink beneath her—the trailers, the palm trees, the set where Martin was probably already reviewing tomorrow’s call sheet—and she thought about how she was supposed to be down there, performing, surviving, holding herself small enough that he couldn’t find her.
Instead she was in the air heading toward a man she’d been pushing away for a week and she still hadn’t told him why.
In her headphones, Lily’s voice cracked through static: “You know your man never does anything small.”
The coastline arced beneath them, water catching the last light in copper.
The dock came up first. A narrow line of wood cutting into turquoise water.
Then the yacht, white and absurdly beautiful.
Then Stefan stood at the end of it. And her breath shortened, because the last time she'd seen him, she’d been walking away and he’d been standing in the doorway of his villa, letting her go.
The helicopter settled. She freed her belt. The blades rose again and took Lily with them. It was just Erika on a beach with the wind flattening her dress against her legs, and Stefan walking toward her at a careful pace that made her want to cry—not fast, not slow, just measured.
He stopped three feet away. Close enough to touch if she wanted. Far enough to refuse.
“You came.”
Two words, and his voice cracked on the second one.
“I almost didn’t.”
He nodded. Not hurt. Just taking it in.
He offered his hand. Not a grab, not a pull.
Just his palm open between them. She looked at it and thought about every door she hadn’t opened, every text she hadn’t answered, the week of silence she’d built between them.
She put her hand in his because she’d come this far.
The helicopter was gone. The island was behind her. She was so tired of being afraid.
He closed his fingers around hers and they walked the dock toward the gangplank, and he didn’t say anything about what the weekend meant or what had happened or where they stood. He just held her hand. The yacht and the water and the distance from Martin did the rest.
Someone handed them champagne on the way aboard—she didn’t register the face, just the cool glass in her hand and her legs still shaking from the helicopter.
“To borrowed boats and bad ideas.” Stefan lifted his glass. He was trying.
“Stefan. After everything I said to you—you can’t just pretend it’s water under the bridge.”
“I’m not pretending. You burned the bridge. I brought a boat.” He clinked his glass against hers. “Fair’s fair.”
A laugh cracked free despite the tension in her chest. Something loosened—not the secret, not the truth, those were still lodged deep—but the muscles in her shoulders, the clench in her jaw, the brace she’d been holding for a week.
There were flowers everywhere. Peonies in water-filled bowls along the railings. She touched one. “Peonies?”
“I told the florist the situation and she stopped feeling sorry for me long enough to pick those.” He shrugged.
“So this is your Friday night routine?” She gestured at the deck, the rigging, the water stretching out in every direction. “Yacht, champagne, flowers you didn’t choose?”
“Borrowed.” His eyes crinkled. “My friend Nico’s boat. This is his smallest.”
“His smallest?”
“The bigger one’s got a helipad. Nico doesn’t do things simply.” He said it with the fondness of an old story.
He showed her around—the salon below deck with its leather sofas and dark wood, the galley where a chef was doing something with butter and garlic and thyme that made her stomach clench because she realized she hadn’t eaten since yesterday morning.
Stefan noticed. He didn’t say anything, but he went quiet, and she knew he was adding it to the list of things he’d been tracking—the weight loss, the shadows under her eyes, the flinching at sudden sounds.
And the list was getting long enough that one day soon he was going to ask her a question she couldn’t deflect, and she was going to have to decide whether to lie to his face or tell him about Martin.
He stopped at a door at the end of the hallway and opened it, and the master cabin was all warm light and dark ocean—amber lanterns, a bed she tried not to look at, and one entire wall of glass with the water moving behind it.
“The room is yours.” Stefan leaned against the doorframe. “I’ll be on deck. Come find me when you’re ready.”
He left before she could argue. The door clicked shut. She stood alone in a room that smelled like salt and clean linen and faintly, underneath, like him.
She opened the closet looking for something to wear and found a robe hanging next to a few button-downs and a pair of jeans, folded on the shelf—Stefan's, probably, or left over from Nico.
She washed her face and watched the makeup swirl down the drain—the contouring that made her look more like Anneliese, the concealer over the shadows Martin’s schedule had put under her eyes.
She pulled on the robe. Looked at herself in the mirror.
Bare-faced, hair wrecked from the helicopter.
She looked thinner than she’d realized. Hollowed out.
Once she was on the deck, the night opened up. Stars everywhere. Stefan stood at the rail, sleeves rolled, and he turned at her approach. His face shifted—not a smile, exactly. A man setting down something heavy.
“There you are.”
“Here I am.” She drew the robe tighter.
His eyes moved over her face—the bare skin, the freckles, the wet hair she hadn’t bothered to fix. “There she is.”
At the table—wine, plates of lemon-butter trout and charred asparagus, risotto that smelled like hours of cooking, and a candle that kept guttering in the breeze so that Stefan had to relight it twice with a lighter he’d borrowed from the chef—she sat and took the first bite.
The hunger hit her—real hunger, not nerves—and she realized she hadn’t tasted food in days.
“Good?” he asked.
“I forgot what being hungry felt like.” She said it without thinking, and then heard it, and Stefan’s fork paused for a half-second before he kept eating.
They talked. Not about Martin, not about the set, not about any of the things pressing against her teeth. He told her about his father’s sailboat. A rinky-dink thing his dad had saved for years to buy.
“My Tita says la fama no vale nada—tráete a casa sano y salvo,” he said. “Fame means nothing. Bring yourself home safe. I spent ten years chasing the thing she told me didn’t matter, and she—” He stopped. Took a breath. “Anyway. She was right.”
Erika thought about her own mother.
“My mother would have framed that. Put it right next to Anneliese’s first headshot.”
Stefan laughed—not the polite kind, the real kind—and she realized she’d told the truth without it costing her, and the freedom of that was startling.
He reached across the table. His fingers brushed her wrist. She flinched—fast, involuntary, the reflex Martin had trained into her. Stefan’s hand went still.
“Erika.”
“I’m fine.” She heard herself say it and hated the sound of it. “I’m fine. It’s just been a long week.”
He held her gaze for a moment that lasted too long.
She watched him decide whether to believe her, watched him choose to let it go, not because he believed her but because he’d promised not to push.
She thought, this is what I’m doing to him.
I’m turning his kindness into a cage. I’m using his patience against him.
The guilt of that landed in her stomach.
“Can I tell you something?” His voice settled, serious.
She looked at him, this man who’d stood on a dock not knowing if she’d come and relit a candle twice and hadn’t asked a single question he knew she couldn’t answer. She nodded.
“Every time I’ve told you how I feel, there was always something in the way.
Martin. The cameras. Your sister. The whole goddamn production.
” He turned his glass slowly. “Right now, there’s nothing.
Just us and open water. And I keep waiting for the catch, but it’s not coming.
” He looked at her. “This is what it’s supposed to feel like. I didn’t know that until you.”
And there it was, what she’d been running from. Not his anger or his rejection but this. His openness. The way he handed her his whole chest.
Stefan’s thumb brushed her cheek. He was seeing her—not pushing, not asking, just seeing. She crossed the distance between them, because she closed it, not him. Their lips met. His hands cradled her face.
He breathed against her mouth, “Stay with me this weekend.”
“Just the weekend.” Her whisper barely carried over the water against the hull.
The yacht rocked beneath them. Stefan’s arm circled her waist. She let herself have this one night where nobody was watching, nothing was required, and the truth could wait until morning.