58. Erika
ERIKA
She already knew what he was going to say.
The corridor was still, and she stood there with that knowledge sitting in her chest—quiet and certain, the kind of thing you’ve been not-letting-yourself-know for a long time—and waited for him to say it anyway.
“To tell you that I love you.” His voice dropped on the last words. “I’m in love with you, Princesa.”
She didn’t say anything. The anger she’d been carrying for three months was doing something complicated—not dissolving, not hardening, just shifting around what he’d said.
“I hear you,” she said finally. “And I believe you. That’s the problem.”
Hope crossed his face, and behind it the knowledge that hope might not be enough.
“It’s not about the statement—your team went behind your back, Martin used it, I understand what happened.” She kept her voice steady. “But you let me believe the worst of you for three months. You knew where I was. You knew I was at Anneliese’s. Why didn’t you try?”
“You told me not to touch you.”
“That’s not an answer.”
“You meant it.”
“I meant it at that moment. That moment passed.” She held his gaze. “Why didn’t you try after?”
His face did the thing that comes after guilt.
He looked away first. “Because it was easier not to. Because I told myself you were better off without someone who’d already proved he’d choose wrong under pressure.
And because if I tried and you still didn’t want me, I’d have to live with that instead of just the possibility. ”
She hadn’t expected him to be that honest.
“And Spain?” she said. “Cudillero is just a longer way of saying you’re still choosing the easier thing.”
“Maybe. Or maybe I’m just done pretending this city was ever going to give me back what I came here for.”
“Is there a difference?”
“I don’t know anymore.” He looked at her steadily. “You’re not afraid of what I represent anymore. Anneliese’s enemy. The trap. Three months ago, you would have been managing this conversation. You’re not.”
She didn’t confirm it. Didn’t deny it either. “What happens next time something breaks? Because something always breaks. I’ve spent three months learning how to be a person without someone else’s crisis at the center of it. I’m not the same person who went to that island.”
“I know.” He said it like he meant it, not like he was agreeing to end the conversation.
“Then you know why I can’t do this yet.” She kept her voice level.
“It’s not about trusting you. It’s trusting myself, that I won’t lose myself in you again.
I’m still figuring out who I am when I’m not being someone’s other half.
And I’m terrified that if I let you in before I know that, I’ll disappear again.
Into you. Into us. Into whatever shape I need to be to make this work. ”
He was quiet for a long moment.
“I know what you did,” she said. “The files, the evidence, all of it. And I forgive you for the silence, for all of it. But forgiveness isn’t the same as being ready.”
“I didn’t come here expecting anything different.” He said it without self-pity. “I came because you deserved to hear it from me. That I love you. That I know what I got wrong.”
“What did you get wrong?” She asked it genuinely—not as a test, just because she wanted to hear him say it.
“Every time it got hard, I found a reason it wasn’t my fight. The day I figured out what Martin was doing, I should have told you. Instead of taking you to dinner and hoping someone else would handle it.” He exhaled. “All of it. Every time I chose easy over right, you paid for it.”
She nodded slowly. That was the truth of it. The whole shape of it, finally named.
“There’s a jet tonight. I’m going to Cudillero.” He reached toward her, stopped. Let his hand drop. “I just needed you to know. Even if it doesn’t change anything.” His voice dropped. “Te amo, Erika. Even if you can’t love me back.”
She stood there for one more second, just one, with three months of silence and everything they’d just said and all the things she still couldn’t say yet sitting in the space between them.
She turned away before she could change her mind. Her heels on the marble floor, each step taking her further from something she wasn’t sure she could afford to want yet.
At the end of the corridor, Anneliese was there—not moving toward her, not intercepting, just present. She’d been waiting. She took one look at Erika’s face and didn’t ask.
She just held out her hand.
Erika took it and they went in together.
The theater was already dimming when they found their seats—Anneliese on one side, Bradley on the other, Lily slipping in from somewhere next to Erika and taking her hand without a word.
His name appeared first—STEFAN CRUZ—and she made herself look at it like a composition. Weight and balance. Negative space. Nothing more. Then hers: And introducing ERIKA MORGAN. Gold text on black. Scattered applause. They didn’t know who she was yet.
For the next two hours she watched herself move across the screen like she was watching someone else.
The lighting was beautiful—golden hour on the beach, the kind of warmth she’d mix with cadmium yellow and burnt sienna, blue shadows in the club scene cut with ultramarine gray.
She’d never noticed during filming. Now she couldn’t stop noticing.
The final scene faded. She was already reaching for her purse when the screen didn’t go dark.
Footage. Raw, behind-the-scenes—the kind of B-roll that played at wrap parties, not premieres. Someone had authorized this. Someone who knew what was in it.
The jet-ski sequence. Early in filming, before anything had happened, before Martin, before the statement, before any of it. And there was Stefan, and he was looking at her.
Not at the camera. Not at the horizon. At her.
She didn’t move toward the exit immediately.
Just sat there and let her artist’s eye do what it always did—read the frame, assess the composition, figure out what the camera had caught that the subject hadn’t known it was catching.
The angle was slightly behind and to his left. He wouldn’t have known he was shot.
His hands were very still. She'd drawn those hands. Spent too long on the knuckles, the veins, the way tendons shifted when he turned a page. Told herself it was a craft. Artist's eye. Just a study.
She stood up. Not a decision. Her body was moving before she’d caught up with why.
More footage. Different weeks, different setups, and in every frame the same thing—Stefan at an angle he wouldn’t have noticed, his attention on a point just off-camera that was, she understood now, wherever she was standing.
The angles were the ones she’d drawn. The light falling across his face was the light she’d been chasing with her pencil at two a.m. in a villa she’d told herself she was just borrowing.
She’d known. The anger arrived first—hot and specific, directed entirely at herself.
She’d known and she’d drawn every page of it and called it observation and let herself disappear into Martin’s production and Stefan’s silence and three months of recovery and never once admitted that the sketchbook full of his face was the most honest thing she’d produced in years.
She reached the exit door. Pushed it open an inch.
She stopped. Couldn’t move.
Week one. Week two. Week three. And in every frame he was already looking at her like that, and she’d been looking back with a pencil in her hand and calling it art, and she’d walked away from him two hours ago and told herself she wasn’t ready.
“What are you still doing here?” Lily’s voice, low and fierce, right at her ear. “Go.”
Erika pushed through the double doors back into the lobby.
Lily was already gone—peeled off toward the valet.
Anneliese and Bradley were on their feet, and what Erika caught in the half-second before anyone spoke was the quality of Anneliese’s face—the way she started to arrange it into something, the performance beginning to assemble itself, and then stopped.
What was underneath was quieter. More real.
“Eri—”
“I’m going after him.” Steady. “Where is he?”
Anneliese’s hands found hers, and for once there was nothing performed in it—just her sister, holding on the way she used to before either of them learned how not to.
One second. Then Anneliese released her.
“There’s my sister.”
Erika looked at her—at the face she’d been reading for twenty-six years, at the quieter thing underneath, more Anneliese than anything she’d seen in months.
“Don’t push it,” she said.
Anneliese almost smiled. “You know this is the plot of every romantic comedy you’ve ever made fun of.”
“Don’t.” A beat. “I’m still going.”
“Obviously.”
Then Erika turned to Bradley.
“Malibu,” he said. “24847 Pacific Coast Highway. He mentioned it after the screening. Said he was going home to pack.”
Everything else dropped away. Just the address and the distance between here and there.
She looked at Anneliese. Anneliese looked back—reading her face the way she always had, knowing what was coming, already stepping aside.
“I’ll call a car,” Anneliese started.
“No time.” She held out her hand to Bradley. “Keys.”
He blinked. Grinned, dropping them into her palm. The keys were heavier than she expected. Solid. Her fingers closed around them.
Premiere dress. Borrowed car. PCH at midnight. Either the most romantic thing she’d ever done or the most idiotic. The ending would determine which.
They moved through the lobby—the three of them cutting through the premiere crowd in formal wear with somewhere to be.
The noise of the crowd, the classical music, the flash of someone’s camera as they passed—all of it registering as background while she moved through it with the keys already in her hand, the address already in her head, the distance between here and there already being calculated in some part of her that had stopped asking permission.
Lily was at the valet stand with the Castellan already waiting. She looked at Erika—one look, the one that meant she’d already understood everything—and squeezed her arm.
“I saw your face when you came out of that corridor.” A beat. “Go.”
Erika pulled her into a hug, fast and fierce. “Thank you.”
Lily held on for one extra second. Then stepped back. “Don’t overthink it. Just drive.”
Anneliese appeared at her shoulder. “If you get that dress wet,” she said, “I’m never speaking to you again.”
The laugh arrived before Erika could shape it into anything—not the dark kind, not the defensive kind, just a laugh. She heard it come out of her and didn’t recognize it immediately and then did.
Anneliese’s hands found the dress, straightening a fold at the hip. Then she stepped back. Her eyes were bright.
“Go get him, Bean.”
Anneliese took the passenger seat. Bradley folded himself into the back.
Erika didn’t wait. She floored it.
Bradley’s Castellan smelled like leather and expensive cologne, and she was currently sweating through emerald silk and crying tracks into her perfect foundation, but she genuinely did not care.
She took a corner too fast. Anneliese grabbed the door handle.
Sunset to the PCH, the city sliding past in amber and neon. She pushed through a yellow light at La Cienega, caught the 10 west, the air changed when the ocean got close. Salt came through the windows before she could see the water.
“We’re forty minutes from Malibu,” Bradley said from the back. “If he’s still packing, we’ve got a shot.”
“A shot?” The word came out smaller than she intended.
“You’re making it,” Anneliese said firmly. “Just drive.”
She drove.
The Pacific appeared on her left—she heard it before she saw it, waves breaking somewhere past the open windows. The road opened up. She pushed the Castellan harder.
Her hands were steady on the wheel. She noticed that. Three months of hands that shook at two a.m. Steady now. Both of them.
The Malibu hills rose ahead. Somewhere up there, Stefan was packing his life into suitcases.
Including me.
Thirty minutes. Maybe less if she kept pushing it. Maybe more if there was traffic on the hill. She didn’t know. She kept her foot down.
Anneliese’s hand found hers on the gearshift. Squeezed once. “Almost there, Bean.”
She didn’t slow down. Took the next curve with the Castellan hugging the road, the ocean a dark roar on her left, the hills rising on her right.
Please. She didn’t know who she was asking.