THE BILLIONAIRE HUSBAND

What Survives Daylight.

Chapter Three

The morning after was quieter than either of them expected. Elizabeth woke before her alarm, the way she always did lately, and lay there for a moment cataloguing the strangeness of waking up without the familiar weight of dread in her chest.

Downstairs, William was already awake, standing at the kitchen window with two cups of coffee going cold on the counter — one black, one with too much cream, exactly the way she'd always taken it, though he'd pretended for years not to remember.

"You made coffee," she said, coming to stand beside him.

"I made an attempt at normalcy," he corrected. "I wasn't sure if last night was the kind of thing that survives daylight."

"Some things don't." She wrapped her hands around the mug he handed her. "But I don't think this is one of them."

He studied her face like he was still afraid of finding something there he couldn't fix. "I meant what I said."

"I know." She let the silence sit a moment before continuing. "That's what scares me. It would've been easier if you didn't."

Outside, the city was waking up too — delivery trucks, the first commuters, a version of ordinary life neither of them had let themselves belong to in a long time. William reached over and, for the first time in longer than he could count, simply took her hand without asking permission or bracing for rejection.

"Where do we go from here?" she asked.

"I don't know," he admitted. "But I'd like to find out. Slowly, this time. No monuments. No checks standing in for words."

She almost smiled. "Just words, then."

"Just words. And coffee that's gone cold because I was too busy watching you wake up to remember to reheat it."

That, finally, got a real laugh out of her — small, surprised, the first one in what felt like years that didn't have grief hiding underneath it.

Neither of them knew yet what the next twelve years would look like, whether the debt language would ever fully disappear from how they spoke to each other, or whether trust — once so thoroughly rationed — could be spent freely again. But for the first time in a long time, neither of them