48. Erika
ERIKA
Erika woke to sunlight on her face and Stefan’s arm around her waist and the slow rock of the yacht beneath them, and for three full seconds she didn’t remember any of it—not Martin, not the switch, not the lie she was carrying—just warmth and salt air and his heartbeat against her shoulder blade.
Then it came back. All of it. And she held still and breathed and decided: today. She would tell him today. He’d said te amo with her face in his hands and he’d meant it, and she owed him the truth, and maybe he’d hear it and stay.
He was showing her the reef line from the deck, coffee in one hand, the other resting on her thigh like it belonged there, and the water was a blue she’d have to invent a new pigment for, and his shirt from last night hung over a chair, and she thought about how to say it.
Stefan, Martin knows about the switch. He’s been using it to control me.
She rehearsed it in her head while he talked about coral formations and it sounded simple and impossible and terrifying.
After snorkeling. She’d tell him after snorkeling.
The reefs were everything he’d promised. Sun-drunk and salt-crusted when they surfaced, his arm around her waist in the shallows, laughing at nothing, and she thought, this is what it could be like if I just tell him the truth, and for the first time in weeks, she believed it.
Back on deck, her phone buzzed. She almost ignored it—probably Olivia with another scheduling question—but it buzzed again, and again, and again.
She picked it up. Fourteen missed calls. Twenty-three texts. All from Olivia, Annie’s manager, Annie’s best friend, the woman who never panicked about anything.
The most recent was a link. No message, just: CALL ME. NOW.
She tapped it and Scandalville loaded—the podcast she and Anneliese used to mock over wine—and the headline was there before the page finished rendering.
EXPOSED: Inside the Morgan Twin Switch-Up—How Two Sisters Conned Hollywood’s Hottest Production
She read it standing up with the coffee still warm in her hand and Stefan still talking about the afternoon dive three feet away, and her artist’s eye did what it always did under pressure—went clinical, detached, started cataloguing details like she was studying a reference photo instead of watching her life detonate.
Call sheets with Anneliese’s name on days Erika was on set.
Rehearsal schedules that didn’t match. Multiple sources on set, on record.
Timeline discrepancies going back to week one.
Someone had built this carefully. Someone with access to every schedule, every call sheet, every piece of production paperwork that only a handful of people could touch.
Martin has access to all of that.
The thought was there and gone—because she scrolled down and Stefan’s name was on the page and Martin’s wasn’t, and the thought dissolved.
Statement from the representatives of Stefan Cruz:
She read it once. Read it again. Made herself read it a third time because the words kept colliding with the man standing three feet away and she couldn’t make them fit in the same world.
Mr. Cruz was made aware of the deception approximately three weeks into production—
He’d known. For weeks. While the callus on his thumb traced her cheekbone. While he said te amo with her face in his hands.
—and reported this information to the studio immediately through appropriate channels—
Reported. Like she was an incident he’d flagged and filed.
—despite ongoing challenges created by Ms. Morgan’s erratic and unprofessional conduct, Mr. Cruz remained committed to the integrity of the production—
She set the coffee mug down on the railing.
Carefully. Precisely. Because if she didn’t control this one small thing—the placement of a mug on a flat surface—she was going to shatter in a way she couldn’t put back together.
Then she opened StyleSnap, because she needed to know the full scope of what had been done to her sister before she did anything else.
Anneliese’s name was trending. Number one.
The photo was there—the one from the beach at dawn, the one Martin had slid across his desk like a death warrant. Stefan on his knees in the sand, his forehead pressed to her palm.
Now it had eggplant emojis and four hundred thousand likes and strangers were dissecting her sister’s career in the comments. Gold digger. Con artist. Not even that pretty.
Every audition Annie had fought for. Every role she’d built. Every careful year of protecting a reputation that Erika had just burned to the ground because she fell in love and stopped thinking.
She looked up. Stefan was on his feet, saying her name, reaching for her, and she stepped sideways—not a flinch, not a retreat, a choice—and his hand passed through the space where she’d been.
“What’s Annie’s number at the lawyer’s office?”
That was the first thing she said. Not how could you, not you lied to me, not your name is on this. She asked for her sister.
Stefan stared at her. “What? Erika, what’s—”
“The statement, Stefan.” She held the phone between them, screen out, and watched his face as he read it. Watched for the tell—the flicker of recognition, the guilt, the moment where surprise would shade into something rehearsed. “Your team. Two hours ago. While we were in the water.”
She pulled the phone back while he was still reeling, her thumbs flying across the glass as she dialed Olivia.
“How’s Annie?”
“What do you think?” Olivia’s voice was raw. “She’s with her lawyers. Studios are pulling out. Her agent won’t return calls.” A breath that shook. “They’re calling her a con artist, Erika. Annie. Who has never lied about a single thing in her professional life.”
“The statement—”
“His team moved fast. Too fast.” Olivia’s voice hardened. “Like they had it drafted and ready. Like someone told them it was coming.”
Erika looked at Stefan. His face was white.
“I have to go,” she said. “Tell Annie I’m coming. Tell her I’ll fix this.”
She didn’t know how. But she said it because it was the only thing she could do—make a promise to her sister and figure out the rest later.
She ended the call and turned to face him. Six feet of deck between them. Neither of them moved.
“I didn’t know.” His voice was hoarse. “Erika, I swear—I didn’t know about that statement. I didn’t authorize it. Alex must have—when the podcast dropped and I wasn’t answering—”
He was shaking. She could see it in his hands, the same hands that had held her face last night, and a part of her—the part that was still lying in the dark cabin listening to his heartbeat—wanted to believe him.
She didn’t move.
“You knew about the switch for weeks. You knew, and you told Isabelle, and your team had a statement drafted, polished, and sent in two hours.” She kept her voice level because if she let it crack, she’d either scream or collapse and she wasn’t going to give him either.
“That’s not a panic response, Stefan. That’s a plan.
And the plan was to make Annie the villain. ”
“That’s not—Erika, Martin leaked this. Martin has been—”
“Martin’s name isn’t on that statement, Stefan. Yours is.”
He flinched.
And she was looking at him—at the flinch, at the wet in his eyes, at the man who’d said te amo twelve hours ago with her face in his hands—and she was also looking at the phone in her hand where his name sat above the words erratic and unprofessional next to her sister’s name, and those two things could not exist in the same person, they couldn’t.
She’d been turning them over and over since she read it and they would not fit.
“Escúchame, please—just let me—”
“In English, Stefan.”
It wasn’t that she didn’t understand. She’d heard enough of his Spanish by now—te amo, aquí, hermosa, the language of the dark cabin and the promise and the way his voice sounded when he forgot to perform. She couldn’t let those sounds into the same air as this conversation or she’d break.
She watched his jaw work. Watched his eyes go glassy. He was already reaching for his phone. “I’ll call Alex. Right now. I’ll retract the statement, I’ll—”
“The first story is the only story. Headlines stick. Corrections get buried.” She said it quietly. “This is the version of us that exists now.”
He stopped dialing. Looked at her. “What do you need? Just tell me and I’ll—”
“There’s nothing.” She could feel something shutting down inside her chest, some essential thing going dark like a building losing power floor by floor.
“Annie’s career is on fire and your name lit the match and it doesn’t matter if you were holding it or someone handed it to you.
She’s still burning. You made me look like an idiot .
. . I fell in love with you. And your name is on that statement.
Figure out how those two things are supposed to exist in the same world, because I can’t. ”
She said it and watched it land and felt nothing. That was the worst part. She’d expected rage or grief or satisfaction and instead there was just absence—the place where trust used to be, scraped out and hollow.
“I want off this yacht.”
“The captain said the currents—”
“Now, Stefan.”
He opened his mouth. Closed it. Nodded.
She walked toward the cabin stairs without looking back, and behind her she heard him pick up his phone and dial and say “Alex, what the fuck did you do” in a voice she’d never heard from him before—raw and shaking and furious—and her feet stuttered on the stairs, just for a second, just one half-step where her body tried to turn around before she told it not to, and then she kept walking because it didn’t matter, because knowing or not knowing didn’t unburn what was already ash, and her sister was somewhere with lawyers and Erika was on a yacht in a salt-stiff sundress and the man behind her was either a liar or a fool and she couldn’t afford to find out which because Anneliese needed her and that was the only thing she was sure of anymore.