He couldn't finish the question — if I have nothing, am I still — so I finished the answer, and I did it the way we do things now, in the daylight, with no kindness laid over the top to make it go down easier. Because the kind version would have been a lie, and he'd have heard the lie, and the lie would have left the real fear exactly where it was, buried, doing its work in the dark.

Paper Vows is a serialized fake-marriage billionaire romance audiobook, written by Mia. New episodes daily.