hope smith

Some ghosts don't stay buried. Some just stop calling. For six months, emergency dispatcher Cass Monroe has answered the same silent call, from the same rural address, at exactly 2:17 A. M. Protocol says it's a glitch. Her supervisor says it's not her case. But when the caller finally whispers one word-her childhood nickname, a name only one person on earth ever used-protocol stops mattering. Because Cass buried that man four years ago.
Braving flood warnings and a road that shouldn't be driveable, Cass finds herself standing in front of a converted railway cottage at the edge of the Yorkshire Dales-and face to face with Elliot Shaw. Her fiancé. The man she eulogized in front of a hundred and forty people. The man who has been alive this entire time, hiding under another name, letting her grieve a lie. Before she can turn around and drive back into the storm, the floodwaters close the only road out.
Trapped overnight in the home of a dead man who isn't dead, Cass wants exactly one thing: the truth. All of it. No matter what it costs either of them. What she gets instead is a confession that will unravel everything she thought she knew about the people she trusts most-a murder Elliot witnessed six years ago, a disappearance that was never about leaving her, and a threat that has been closer than either of them ever imagined.
As the water rises and the walls of Elliot's careful, isolated life come crashing down around them, old love resurfaces alongside old rage, and Cass must decide whether the man in front of her is still the one she lost-or someone entirely new she's only just beginning to know. They can't go back to who they were. But maybe, if they survive what's coming, they can find their way to something worth staying for.
STAY UNTIL MORNING is a slow-burn, second-chance romantic suspense novel about grief, identity, and the terrifying, healing choice to finally tell the truth-featuring a fiercely protective, green-flag hero, a heroine who refuses to be shielded from her own life, and a sad-but-hopeful ending that earns every bit of its light. Perfect for readers who love forced proximity, "he was supposed to be dead" tropes, and romance that isn't afraid to sit in the dark before it finds the dawn.