57. Erika
ERIKA
Lily’s hands were quick and sure, pinning the last strand into place, and Erika stood in Anneliese’s dressing room in emerald silk and tried not to think about what came next.
Don’t think about it. Just stand here. Just be a person standing in a dress.
Yesterday’s interview was already everywhere.
She’d turned off her notifications sometime around midnight and hadn’t turned them back on.
Tonight she’d walk a red carpet in front of the same fifty thousand people who’d watched Martin attack her on a livestream.
Tonight they’d get to look at her on purpose.
Every lens pointed at her, every flash calibrated to find what the subject was trying to hide.
She’d spent her whole life behind the canvas. Tonight she was on it.
Lily stepped back to look at her work and Erika caught her eye in the mirror.
“Tell me I don’t look like I’m about to be arrested.”
Lily tilted her head. “I’ve dressed a lot of women for things they didn’t want to do.” A beat. “You don’t look like that.”
Erika looked at herself. Actually looked the way she hadn’t been able to for three months. The woman in the mirror looked like she’d made a decision. Which she had. Yesterday. In a chair, in a Beverly Hills living room, with a red light blinking.
“What if I don’t mean it yet?”
Lily’s hands settled warm on her shoulders. “Remember the pencil?” She held Erika’s gaze in the mirror. “This is just showing up in a very expensive dress.”
Easy for you to say. You’re not the one who might vomit on the red carpet.
She was still looking at herself, and it didn’t make her want to look away, which was new.
Then Anneliese appeared in the mirror behind her.
Gold and black. Hair perfect. The particular expression she wore when she was trying not to let something show on her face and failing, because Erika had been reading that face for twenty-six years.
She stopped in the doorway. Looked at Erika—not at the dress, not at Lily’s work. At her.
“You’re wearing it.” The corner of her mouth lifted. “Most people let a dress wear them.”
“High praise from someone who once told me earth tones were a personality disorder.”
Anneliese’s smile went genuine before she caught it. “Don’t push it.”
A buzz from the vanity cut through the room. Anneliese glanced at her phone and answered. “Isabelle?”
She listened. Erika watched her sister’s face cycle through something she couldn’t read from across the room—tension first, hand gripping the phone, knuckles going white—and then a loosening underneath it. Her free hand pressed flat against the vanity.
What is it? What did she say? What—
Anneliese lowered the phone.
“Martin.” Her voice came out careful, measured. “They arrested him last night.”
The room went still. Nothing to do with sound.
Lily made a sound beside her—not quite a laugh, not quite a sob.
Erika didn’t move. Didn’t speak. Just stood in the mirror in the emerald dress and let the word sit there—arrested—too small for what it was supposed to contain, too final for how long they’d been waiting for it.
The door opened. Bradley, champagne already in hand, reading the room in the single glance he always managed. His eyes went to Anneliese—took in her face, whatever was written there—and then moved to Erika’s in the mirror.
He didn’t ask. Just eased the wire cage off the bottle and waited. She nodded. The cork popped.
Bradley’s Castellan pulled away from the curb and Erika watched the city slide past the window.
Arrested. Erika turned the word over, waiting for the impact. She’d expected rage, or relief. There was only a hollow flatness. The city lights blurred past. She wondered when it would feel real.
She looked at her hands in her lap. She’d been thinking about the canvas all day—the unfinished one from the set, sitting in the corner of her Silver Lake apartment now. She hadn’t picked up a brush in three months but her hands kept doing the math anyway.
Anneliese didn’t say anything. Just held her hand in the dark, which was more than enough.
They pulled up to Grauman’s Chinese Theatre and it was exactly as she’d imagined—the facade blazing against the night sky, red carpet stretching out ahead, photographers packed three deep along the barriers. The noise hit before the door opened. A roar, the sound of a crowd that had been waiting.
An attendant opened Anneliese’s door first. She stepped out—a gold gown catching every flash, chin up, the look on her face that Erika recognized as her sister deciding to mean it—and the crowd surged.
Erika’s door opened.
She sat with it for one beat. Just one. The noise pouring in, the flashes strobing through the gap, the red carpet waiting. Tonight they were going to look at her on purpose. And she was going to let them.
Done with small things.
She got out of the car.
The flashes hit immediately—white and relentless, the specific blindness of being the subject rather than the observer. She couldn’t see anything beyond the first row of photographers. Couldn’t see the crowd. Just light.
They walked forward. Her heels sank into the red carpet.
Just walk. Don’t think. Just walk.
Anneliese matched her stride for stride. The photographers called their names and Erika turned toward the lenses because she’d said she would. The flashes hit. She held it—shoulders back, chin up.
You said they could look. Let them look.
She kept walking.
A reporter leaned in at the barrier—young, microphone already extended. “Erika—you’re primarily a visual artist. Are you still working?”
The deflection came up immediately. She stopped.
“Actually—” The word came out before the rest of it. She looked at the reporter. “I don’t know yet.”
They moved on. The carpet noise fell away at the theatre entrance—soft classical music, the art deco lobby opening around her. Gold leaf catching the light. She slowed without meaning to.
Not yet. But something.
Anneliese’s hand found hers.
They went in.
Lily found them in the crowd with a wink. “Told you I’d find you.”
They were halfway to the theater doors when Isabelle Vance stepped out of the crowd, moving through it like she owned the room—because now she did..
“I shredded the NDAs this morning. Stasia’s—all of them, every page. The old board has nothing left to hold over you. I wanted you to hear that from me, not read it somewhere.”
Free. The word didn’t fit. She’d carried the no-NDA as both shield and exposure for three months, and free was more complicated than it sounded. She said “thank you” anyway, because it was true even if it was inadequate.
“What happens to her now? Who’s thinking about that?”
“Solokov. He’s already in contact.” A beat. “She’ll have options she didn’t have before.”
Erika looked at her. “Does she get to be angry? Or does shredding the NDA mean everyone decides she should be grateful now?”
Isabelle’s face shifted. She understood exactly what was being asked. “She gets to feel whatever she feels. That’s the point.”
Isabelle paused. “One more thing. The statement—with Stefan’s name on it.” She met Erika’s eyes. “He didn’t authorize it. His team went behind his back. He tried to retract it the same day. Martin made sure you'd see it anyway.” She didn’t say anything else about it. Just let it sit.
Erika nodded.
Isabelle turned to Anneliese. “And in other exciting news. Paradise Found is greenlit. You and Bradley are cast.”
Anneliese’s jaw dropped. “You’re serious?”
“Dead serious. We just hired our director. You’ll like her work.”
“And—” Isabelle’s eyes glinted. “I’m reviving Model Behavior. Bringing in Ravenna Ferraro to headline.”
Anneliese’s eyebrows shot up. “The Ravenna Ferraro? I thought she’d sworn off television.”
“She had. But I can be very persuasive.” Isabelle smoothed her lapel. “Besides, the woman’s been terrorizing runways for twenty years. Time she terrorized a soundstage.”
Then she was gone.
Erika watched her sister—jaw still dropped, hands starting to move the way they did when Anneliese was assembling the full scale of something—and the pride hit, clean and specific.
This is hers. Let it be hers.
She took a small step back. Not disappearing, simply reclaiming her own space. That was when she caught it. A strip of light at the end of the corridor—hot pink and electric blue bleeding through glass, humming against the dark.
She went toward it.
The lobby noise fell away as she walked. She turned the corner and through the glass, the marquee blazed—STEFAN CRUZ and below it, set apart in its own space, the words she hadn’t let herself imagine: And introducing ERIKA MORGAN.
Seeing her own name there didn't feel like pride. It felt like vertigo—proof that she’d stopped being the invisible one, whether she’d meant to or not.
Her eyes were wet before she understood why.
Yours.
She turned to go back. And then the room did the thing it used to do, reorganized itself around a point she hadn’t located yet. She knew before she turned around.
He was leaning against the far wall of the corridor—a charcoal suit, perfectly cut, an emerald tie the only color on him. When his gaze found hers, something in his expression let go.
She’d spent three months convincing herself she didn’t miss him. Standing ten feet away from him, she understood exactly how well that had worked.
Stefan pushed off the wall. She stayed where she was—not frozen, just choosing to stand still, which was different.
“Erika.” His voice came out rough. “I’m only here because the studio demanded it. Contractually.” The qualifier arrived before anything else—that was him, that was always him, making sure she knew the terms. “But I had to see you. Before I leave.”
She waited.
“I watched it happen.” He said it quietly, without preamble.
“Every day on that set—the praise that was really leverage, the isolation he passed off as care. I watched you fade, inch by inch, and I told myself I was protecting you by staying close. Taking you to dinner. Being present.” His voice dropped.
“I wasn’t protecting you. I was watching you disappear and calling it love so I didn’t have to call it what it actually was. ”
Cowardice. The word arrived in her head before he said it.
“Cobardía.” He said it like he’d been carrying it for three months, which he had.
“And the night on the yacht, when you let your guard down for the first time, I let you believe that wanting to protect you was the same as actually doing it. I sat across from you with your hand in mine and let the trap close anyway.” His voice dropped.
“That’s the thing I can’t undo. Not Martin.
Not the statement. That night. I chose the easier thing when I could have chosen you. ”
The silence had weight. Something had landed.
Her hands were very still at her sides.
“You were there,” she said finally. “You came.” A breath she hadn’t meant to take. “And I told you not to touch me.”
His face took it. Not a flinch. Just the words landing where they were meant to.
“I know.”
“I meant it. In that moment—”
“I know.” Different the second time. Not agreement, just holding it. Letting her have it without reaching for the absolution underneath it.
The lobby noise reached them faintly. Classical music. The murmur of the crowd. The world at its usual pace while they stood outside it.
“I would do it all again,” he said quietly. “Every choice. Every risk. If it meant you were safe—”
“I didn’t need to be safe.” Steadier than she expected. “I needed to be believed.”
He went still. She watched it land—slow, the way understanding lands when someone turns a sentence over and finds what’s inside.
“Sí.” Not agreement. Recognition. He exhaled, slow. “That’s the one. That’s what I got wrong.”
She didn’t say anything. Neither did he. Just stood there with three months of silence between them and all the things that silence had contained.
“I’ve said ‘I love you’ in seven languages on screen,” he said. “Te amo. Je t’aime. Ti amo.” His voice cracked on the last one—barely, but she heard it. “Every time it was just a line. Blocking. The emotion required by the scene.” He looked at her. “You’re the first person I ever meant it for.”
The anger was still there, technically. She just couldn't find the shape of it anymore. What replaced it had no name yet—not forgiveness, not surrender. More like standing at the edge of a decision she’d already made without realizing it.
“Mi amor.” Barely audible. “If it meant I got one more chance to—”