His Tamed Wife, The Wild Heiress
I had stopped noticing the emptiness around month nine, which felt, in retrospect, like its own small grief—not that he wasn't there, but that I had adjusted to it so completely that his absence had become the baseline, the normal, the thing I organized my nights around.
So when I became aware, slowly, that my heated body pillow was breathing—
I went very still.
The breathing was deep and even. The surface under my cheek was not the smooth, temperature-regulated fabric of my pillow. It was warmer than that, and less uniform, and there was a texture to it, and a heartbeat, and—
I tilted my head up by approximately half an inch, just enough to confirm what my nervous system was already insisti