You Weren't Supposed to Stay. An After Midnight Novel, #4

He fixed her faucet. He learned her coffee order. He never once raised his voice. That was how he got in. Joelle Carver has spent twenty-six years learning to need no one. A foster kid turned night-shift waitress turned law student, she built one small, locked life that belongs to her and no one else - one apartment, one key, one door that opens only from the inside. Then she meets Liam. He's kind in a way no one has ever been kind to her.
He repairs what's broken. He remembers what she likes. He stays. And piece by piece, repair by repair, the man she let in for one night becomes the air she breathes - until the apartment that was hers is simply the place where he lives too, and the key under the mat has quietly become his. By the time Joelle finds the green velvet hair tie at the bottom of his bag, she already knows. By the time she learns the name he says in his sleep - and what happened to the woman who answered to it - she understands exactly what she's living with.
And she understands the rule that kept the last woman dead: the danger was never in staying. It's in leaving. Because men like Liam don't break down the door. They wait for you to hold it open. They make the people who love you jealous of your cage. And the only women who don't survive them are the ones who try to walk out. Joelle has been underestimated her whole life. Everyone always assumed the woman alone was the fragile one.
They were wrong. A slow-burn psychological thriller about coercive control, the long arithmetic of survival, and the most dangerous word a trapped woman can say - for readers of Gillian Flynn, Caroline Kepnes's YOU, and the darker side of domestic suspense. You weren't supposed to stay. You were supposed to be the season I survived.