Ever since Autumn Woods released Nightshade, the first book in the Sorrowsong University series, we’ve been waiting to see what was going to happen next to Alex and Ophelia, especially after that wild cliffhanger. And now the wait is almost over as the second book of the series is almost ready to be released with all its secrets and turns that made us obsessed with this dark academia romance. With a new semester buzzing, we’re ready to see what will happen next as they are now torn apart.
Cosmopolitan has an exclusive look at Daybreak by Autumn Woods, which is set to be released on July 28, 2026. Now separated with Alex in NYC and Ophelia back in Scotland, there’s still a secret between them. One that has them on edge as someone sets out to reveal it to everyone. Even after a deep betrayal, they’re forced to lean on each other once again to get through it and keep their secret safe. But can they learn to love and trust each other again in order to survive? Here’s some more info from our friends at Zando:
Maxton Hall meets RuNyx in the stunning conclusion to the Nightshade duology, a dark academia romance brimming with snarky banter and sizzling tension, in which Alex and Ophelia must fight through betrayal, heartbreak, and deadly new threats.
Alex’s Corbeau-Green’s world is burning down around him, and Ophelia Winters is desperate to prove she didn’t light the fire.
When Ophelia first accepted a scholarship from Sorrowsong, an elite university in the Scottish Highlands, she wanted nothing more than to destroy Alex and his family at any cost. But that was before she knew him, before they became each other’s everything. Now, after an unthinkable betrayal and the disappearance of his father, Alex is forced to return to New York, desperate to forget what they had, and salvage the damage done to his family. In Scotland, Ophelia is left reeling, alone . . . and watched.
With a new anonymous tormentor threatening to release evidence that Ophelia and Alex committed a murder on campus, it’s clear that they’re going to need each other once again. But can they find a way to trust each other, and repair the love that they had? And even if they can—will it be enough this time to keep them alive?
Thankfully, we don’t have to wait too long to get an update on this duo. Check out an exclusive excerpt below! Just make sure to preorder Daybreak so you can check out what happens next when it’s released!
[DRAFT]
From: Alex Corbeau-Green
Subject:
Consumerism (noun) the selfish and frivolous collecting of
products
To: Ophelia Winters
An interactive billboard has appeared outside my office building. You’d hate that.
Advertisements and forced interaction - your two least favorite things. I can
already picture the expression on your face.
Fuck, I miss you.
“ARE YOU AIDING the cops in their search for your father, Alex?”
“Are you polishing your head to make it that shiny, Andre, or is it natural?” I bite back, as the reporter desperately follows me toward the ground floor entrance of Green Aviation’s office building for what must be the tenth time in two weeks.
My cigarette hisses against the trash can outside. The flash of a camera somewhere behind me has me gritting my teeth.
“How’s your mom coping? Any comment on her health?”
I swallow the vitriol sitting in my throat and let Green’s doormen shove the prying media away.
The automatic doors close behind me, and despite all the garish grandeur of Green’s lobby, I’m instantly claustrophobic.
If Green is a pandemic of greed and corruption across the globe, then this shiny office is the rotting epicenter of it all, the sparkling jewel in my father’s empire.
My empire now.
Though, hopefully not for long.
I nod in response to a few overly cheerful good mornings, drumming my fingers on my thigh and willing the elevator to hurry up. Sonya, my publicist, appears beside me, the cloying scent of her perfume scratching the back of my throat. “Ah, Alex. I was hoping I’d catch you.”
I search the immediate vicinity for an outlet to ram a fork into but come up short. “About?”
“Your press conference for tomorrow. I thought you might want to speak a little on your family at the end.”
Apparently all six elevators are stopping at every floor this morning. “It’s a business conference.”
“I know, but it’d be great for your image. Family man, a united front, even with what’s going on with your father.”
I press the call button three more times, like that’ll do anything. That goddamn reporter has me well and truly rattled. “Would using Andre Jackson from Insider Weekly’s head as a bowling ball be good or bad for my image?”
“Alex, it’s a great opportunity to reassure the shareholders that whatever is going on at
home isn’t going to affect—”
The elevator finally arrives, and I hit the button for the penthouse floor and wait until just a sliver of her face is visible between two silver doors to say, “I’ll have Jacqueline put a call in your diary later.”
I slump against the mirror, exhausted before the day has really begun. The claustrophobic metal box fires me unnaturally high in this glass monstrosity of a building, but my mood remains somewhere in the basement garage.
Still, I straighten my collar, smooth the cracks in my mask, steady the shake in my hands, and think of the seven women I do it all for.
The doors slide open after what feels like an age, spitting me out in front of Jacqueline’s desk. It’s quiet on the top floor, thankfully, just the sound of my hammering heart working overtime in my chest.
I rap my knuckles against the desk, an annoying habit of my father’s that I’ve somehow absorbed. “If Sonya emails you about a publicity call—”
“She already has. She’s coming up at three thirty.”
Damn it, these people work fast. “I’m busy at three thirty.”
Her eyes drop to my calendar, open on her laptop screen. “With?”
“I have to . . .” I rub the back of my neck. “Pick the lint from between the keys on my keyboard?”
“A noble attempt,” she says, handing me a coffee. “Enjoy your meeting.”
Great.
Jacqueline is a short, chaotically dressed woman in her late thirties, and though I like her very much, she genuinely sucks at her job.
I interviewed twelve people for this position, and eleven of them were ruthlessly organized assistants with a résumé an inch thick. It felt more like they were interviewing me. With their sharp stilettos, predatory glances, and scarlet fingernails that lingered a little too long on my forearms, they reminded me too much of the women I’d find my father taking out for wholly inappropriate dinners.
Then Jacqueline rocked up, perfectly on time but covered in kids’ stickers. My background check told me she has three young children, living in an apartment in Queens. She looked like a deer in headlights—how I felt inside. She was as lost as I was, but when I asked her the final question, she squared her shoulders beneath her ill-fitting blazer and said, I’m not sure, but I just know we’ll figure it out.
She put so much faith in those words, my daddy issues and I just couldn’t say no.
And she makes a great double espresso.
And like she said we would, we’re figuring it all out. The Green share price is recovering, the media storm is still intense, but we’re not on the front cover of every
newspaper anymore.
On the surface, everything is working out. Beneath? I’m fighting for air.
My father is missing. The FBI showed up here to arrest him, and he was nowhere to be found, nor has anyone seen a trace of him since. A team of private detectives and the FBI’s best can’t even catch his scent.
It’s driving me crazy, plaguing my sleep, squashing my appetite.
Oh, and I’m the CEO of an almost-billion-dollar company. The Financial Times called me Manhattan’s wunderkind, when my most tangible experience managing any kind of business was starting a restaurant chain on The Sims with Charlotte and Mia.
I don’t think our “experimental” food restaurant even had walls or a roof.
I had a vague idea of how my life would look at twenty-three. I thought I’d be a fresh-faced architect, or running a smaller company I’d founded myself. Maybe I’d be traveling the world with no responsibilities.
I didn’t think I’d be a CEO with parental custody of my six sisters. Didn’t think I’d be trying to sneakily arrange my mom’s hospital visits or pay the nanny overtime while I’m stuck in a glass boardroom. Didn’t think I’d spend my evenings arguing with them over how much they hate having security following them around all day.
And despite all this, it’s a brown-eyed redhead that occupies the majority of my headspace. In the month since I last saw her, I’ve thought of little else.
In my father’s—my—office, a low sun bleeds out over the New York skyline, staining the wall in front of the desk a macabre shade of red.
The glass of the window is cool against my forehead, each heavy breath obscuring the busy comings and goings of a morning in the city. The light on the river is the same color as Ophelia’s hair.
I left her without a word.
To make looking in the mirror a more bearable process, I convince myself that my lawyers asking me not to contact Ophelia is the only reason the draft emails piling up on my laptop never get sent, but I know it isn’t true. There’s a part of me that thinks I don’t deserve her, and another part of me that’s hurt. One likes to remind me that I’ve turned her life into a mess of public attention and online hate, and the other plagues my nights with a question I wouldn’t dare to ask myself during the day.
Was any of it real?
I think I’ve accepted by now that Ophelia’s motivation for appearing in my life was so she could gather information, but it’s trying to imagine exactly when her feelings changed that’s keeping me awake into the early hours of the morning. Was it real when she lay beneath the sofa at Carmichael’s office? Was it real when I found her drowned at the tarn? Surely, it was real in the car on Boxing Day, when she held my gaze and gasped my name and made me feel like I was more than enough.
I really, really, need that to be real.
And beneath all of this is one tiny question, one I’m not even sure I have the right to ask.
How could she? I don’t know how that article got leaked to the media. Deep down, I struggle to believe it was her, but she wrote it, nonetheless. She must’ve known what it would do to my family when she typed it all up. It sent my father into a frenzy, throwing guns and clothes into a bag and threatening Fleur and the housekeeper when they tried to stop him from escaping. It’s put my sisters on the front page of every newspaper, every gossip forum.
What a mess.
Every time I shower and shave in the morning, I see a little more of my father looking back at me in the mirror.
I’m turning into him, like he always said I would. I can try to pretend I’m all my mother, soft and kind and good, but the illusion is cracking. I’m fifty percent my father, and that’s a fact I’ll never be able to escape. Every positive thought has a shadow that trails behind it, biting at my heels no matter how fast I run.
I hate how naturally this role comes to me. How I can hear his voice guiding me through meetings, through finance reports, through tough negotiations.
He trained me to be a CEO, but I wish he’d taught me how to be a man.
There’s this sort of sickness that comes with money: The more you have, the more you crave it. We’ve always been rich, but when the zeroes started piling up on my father’s net worth, he became a different man. It’s an addiction. A total loss of sight of the important things.
Vacations stopped. Family dinners stopped. Christmas presents stopped. All the things he should’ve been doing with his money stopped. Everything went back into Green.
He traded his soul for the promise of more wealth. And for my sisters, I cannot let myself fall down the same hole.
Somewhere in the periphery, Jacqueline hovers in my doorway and clears her throat to read from her tablet. I’m only half listening, lazily sketching a female form on my notepad. Like all my sketches these days, it comes out looking like Ophelia. The gentle swell of her hips when she walks, the soft lines across her stomach when she sits, the muscles of her arms, they sit on my brain like a tattoo I can’t erase.
I’m incapable of producing a drawing that doesn’t curve, bend, flow in the same way that her body does. I love her. God, I love her, but maybe she was right. She and I are the right people in the wrong universe. It’s too messy, too complicated, like she always said it would be.
When I get home, when my sisters are in bed and my work laptop is off, there’s nothing to dilute her in my head. She becomes every thought I have and every shaky exhale I make. She’s the subject of my most rattling nightmares and my most carnal dreams.
Without her soft thighs, miserable cynicism, and runny nose, my life has faded back to gray. It would sting less if I hadn’t had a taste of how sweet the other colors could be.
I’m as bad as Harwood says I am: fixated on her in an unhealthy and immature way.
Harwood. That’s what I need. Maybe my therapist can fix me. Low isn’t a strong enough word to describe my mood the past few days. I’m itching to speak with him, but he’s with family in Nigeria for the rest of the week.
Snapping myself out of my thoughts, I dismiss Jacqueline and buzz in Mike and Luis, two other execs who help me run the company. The media can give me as much praise as they like, but half of the decisions I’ve claimed credit for in the past weeks were based on their advice.
Once I’ve finished phase one of my Green plan—steady the ship—I’ll move on to phase two—find a replacement CEO. I’m not stupid. I know a twenty-three-year-old with no passion or drive for the company is not the best fit. These two are the best options I have at the moment. I just can’t trust them fully. I need to make sure I’m not putting Green into the hands of someone like my father.
In the meantime, the pay isn’t so bad. I’ve hired a chef for weekdays, a security team, and another nanny, as well as secured the best care for my mother. I paid a ludicrous amount of money to buy the Land Rover I rented over the holidays to visit Ophelia and have it shipped here—letting it stay at the rental office felt like a crime. Now it sits in the underground garage like a priceless artifact, a museum of my time with her. Sometimes I sit in it just to try to catch her cinnamon scent.
It’s probably fair to say I’m not taking the breakup well.
IT’S GETTING DARK by the time I pull into the garage of our brownstone, flanked by a black security vehicle. I swing into the empty space between the Official Land Rover Ophelia Winters Museum (trademark pending) and the white Audi I bought Fleur for her seventeenth birthday last week.
I step out of the car, giving it a once-over for any trackers. I’m not sure where my father is, and I’m not sure whether he’s feeling immense pride that I’ve protected his precious company from complete collapse, or murderous rage that I’ve taken his job because my girlfriend gave him the biggest metaphorical middle finger in history. Somehow I strongly doubt it’s the former.
I take the elevator into the house, unlocking the door to the main foyer. My little sister, Josie, barrels toward me in a Batman costume, cape flying behind her. “Alex is home!” she shrieks, at a pitch only a sugar-fueled seven-year-old can.
Slamming into me, her arms wrap around my waist. She lets out a dramatic ugh, mumbling something about how much she missed me, how the twelve hours since we last spoke has been the longest amount of time in history, ever. I’d be lying if I said it didn’t warm my chest just a little. “Taking the night off from fighting crime?”
She swishes her cape. “Yep. I’m on vacation. Did you have a
nice day?”
“Nice is certainly one word for it.” I place a gentle hand on her upper back and guide her into the kitchen, where my other sisters, Mia, Evie, Éléanor, and Charlotte, are arguing over how big to roll out the dough for their cookies. My eldest sister’s absence is not surprising; Fleur hasn’t handled any of this well, nor should she have to.
I hate how much they’ve all been through. Hate that the article going live was a grenade in their lives and that the pieces will never return to the way they were before.
I swipe the bowl of cookie dough from the marble counter. They’ve managed to use every pot, pan, and utensil in the kitchen, which is impressive. “Oh, nice of you guys to make me cookies.”
“They’re for my class tomorrow!” Charlotte protests, trying to grab it back.
I steal a bit of the dough. Man, it’s good. It tastes like vanilla. It tastes like my childhood, when my dad still loved my mom and my mom still loved herself.
“How was school?” I ask, setting the bowl back down and opening the fridge for an alcohol-free beer. Five different answers fire back at me as the chef pops his head around the door of the back kitchen.
“Good evening, sir. Chicken pie okay?”
I pop the lid off the bottle. “More than okay. Thank you.”
Having someone cook is a godsend. Without the staff, we’d be a box-mac-and-cheese-fueled mess.
I pick at the label on the bottle, a sinking sensation somewhere in my chest.
Who’ll cook for Ophelia when she has to go back to her parents’ house over the Easter break? The woman won’t even chop an onion.
Staring at six overflowing shelves of fresh produce and home-cooked meals with my sisters’ arguments a familiar soundtrack behind me, I’m struck again by the privilege of it all. I push the fridge door shut, but the rush of cold air that follows has nothing on the chill that hit me when I stepped inside Ophelia’s house at Christmas.
I can’t rid that day from my mind: the silence in her house, the emptiness, the ocean of resentment she crossed just to let me into her life and oh God, I’ve messed up so badly.
I think I’ve broken us beyond repair.
I sit down at the kitchen island, watching the five of them cut the dough into erratically sized circles. I’ve lived in an all-female household for long enough to know that when they’re quiet, it means I’ve interrupted something.
“All right,” I drawl, taking a swig from the bottle, “who has a homecoming date?”
Silence.
“Fleur has a new boyfriend,” blurts Mia, eventually. The others glare at her.
Remain calm, Alex. Act rationally.
I tighten my grip on my phone as I flip through the security feeds in the house, paranoid. “Who is he?”
“He’s a fashion model.”
I shut my phone off, trying to control my protective tendencies. Models are the worst, especially the ones in Fleur’s circle. There’s something ironic about men who paint their fingernails and still manage to be the biggest misogynists on the planet. He’s probably using her as a publicity stunt. “Is he here? Upstairs?”
They all fall silent, obviously sworn to secrecy. Even Mia stares at her feet, the tips of her ears reddening. My mood sours. I head back into the foyer and up the left-hand staircase, stomping as loud as I can so they have time to stop . . . whatever it is they’re doing. “Fleur?”
“What?”
“Can I come in?”
“Nope.”
I put my forehead against the door. “Are you coming down for dinner?”
“Nope.”
“What’s your friend’s name?”
“Freddie,” comes a male voice. He sounds like a wanker, as Ophelia would say. “Hey, bro.”
“How old are you?” I ask, and I hear Fleur mutter an insult under her breath.
“Eighteen.”
I can hear Harwood’s voice in my ear, reminding me for the four millionth time that my sisters are their own people with their own lives, allowed to make their own mistakes. Through gritted teeth, I try to make the bastard feel welcome. “Be good to see you both down at dinner, man.”
And get your slimy hands off my sister.
“Let her live, Alex,” comes a soft voice. My mother steps out of her bedroom at the end of the hall, dressed in cream cashmere loungewear. Her dark hair is loose around her shoulders, glossy, but thinner than it used to be. She looks okay, though, tightrope walking the equilibrium between a manic high and the impending low.
The events of the past month have not been kind to her. If I thought she couldn’t get thinner, she’s managed to. Every hospital visit, they tell me her heart is weak, atrophying like the life behind her eyes. The paranoia seems worse, the anxiety that everyone is plotting against her. Her bipolar diagnosis went untreated for so long with my father it’s hard to catch up with the effects on her health. These days, these level days where it’s easy to recognize the woman beneath the exhaustion, are becoming more and more uncommon.
It sounds morbid, but it’s always a relief to see her alive when I get home. She probably says the same about me.
“I’m trying. But fuck knows what he could do to her in there. We don’t know him at all.”
She hooks her arm around mine as I walk her bony frame down the stairs. “Your first girlfriend was a nasty piece of work. Do you think I couldn’t see that the second she walked through the door?
She used you for your fame and your wealth. But I let you figure it out for yourself.”
I smile. “And now I know to avoid the ones who livestream our first date.”
Her laugh is quiet, but it’s there. “Exactly. How is Ophelia?”
A twinge of pain spears my chest. “She’s okay.”
She gives me a knowing look. “You’re still having someone watch her, aren’t you?”
“Ophelia was as much involved in this whole mess as we were. It’d be foolish of me not to ask Vincenzo’s men to keep half an eye on her. It’s smart business.” And the thought of someone hurting her keeps me up at night, but yeah, smart business.
“Have you spoken with her?” she asks, as I tug her into my father’s—my—enormous home office and sit her down on the desk chair.
“No.”
“Alex.”
“She used our home life, your illness, Dad’s . . . whatever the fuck is wrong with Dad, against us.”
“Against your father,” she corrects. “Not us. I don’t believe she wanted to hurt us.”
I pull the spare chair beside her and sit down, logging on to my laptop. “She mentioned your name in it.”
“Before she knew me, darling. Imagine I died tomorrow. Imagine Fleur and I were killed in a targeted hit-and-run on the highway tomorrow.”
I shudder as I bring up my emails. “Don’t say things like that.”
Her nails scratch in my hair. It makes me want to cry. To curl into the lap of a woman who doesn’t really exist anymore, not the way I want her to. “But imagine, love. What would you do if you knew who was driving the car?”
“Maman,” I sigh, scrubbing my hands down my face. “I’ve over-analyzed it enough already. I don’t care what she did to Cain, I care what she did to you, to the girls. And it’s not like she would forgive me for leaving the way I did, anyway. And the distance. I could go on forever.”
“Tell her your lawyer asked you not to contact her.”
“It’s a cheap excuse. I haven’t contacted her because I can’t bring myself to. Helen’s advice has nothing to do with it.”
“She might’ve written it, but I think we both know she wouldn’t have leaked that article,” she continues, like she’s bringing up a point I haven’t already thought of during the countless sleepless nights of the past month. Like this isn’t the hundredth time we’ve had the exact same conversation.
Ophelia and I are separated by thousands of miles and a vast ocean of mistrust, all the progress I’d made with her shipwrecked at the bottom of it.
“It doesn’t matter, Mom. I’m desperately trying to move on. Even if we did work it out, I’m here and she’s over there. She can’t get on a plane to visit.”
“But once you quit—”
“Mom,” I say, gently. “Please drop it.”
Gentle fingers swipe a lock of too-long dark hair away from my forehead, eyes full of some unidentifiable emotion. Tears pool on her thick, black lashes.
“Don’t say it.” I can’t hear it again.
“Say what?”
“That I look like him. It’s the first thing anyone says when they walk into my office.”
Her bottom lip wobbles. “I was going to say how sorry I am that you’ve ended up in this position, that you’ve ended up in the one job you always made it clear you didn’t want. That you’re the only father figure in their life. I was going to say how sorry I am that you’ve . . .”
“Maman, don’t.”
A lone tear trickles over her cheek. “Ended up with me as a mother and him as a father.”
“You’re the best mother I know,” I whisper, snaking an arm around her bony shoulders. “And I mean that.”
“I’m just so sorry.”
I swivel her chair back to face the laptop. “Enough of that talk. Look at this.”
I bring up an email that I read earlier from Jack, my rugby teammate from Sorrowsong. It’s a forwarded chain of emails between his parents: a top-ranked neurosurgeon and a psychiatrist.
She peers in at the screen, the blue light spilling over her delicate cheekbones. “Another medication. Alex, I . . .”
“It’s been really promising in trials. They’re still rolling it out.”
“Do you know them?”
“Their son is on my rugby team—my old rugby team.”
“You can go back to Sorrowsong. Don’t rule it out.”
“I’m twenty-three, Mom. Too old to start again.”
She laughs, brushing her hair out of her face with a shaky hand. “I was like that at your age. Thinking I was running out of time even though I was just a baby.”
“I was going to schedule a call with his parents so we can learn a bit more. They’re willing to fly here from California to talk to you. Are you interested, hypothetically?”
“I am, but . . . I’ve had a lot of treatments, Alex, and they’ve all seemed promising in the beginning. My mind is tired and my body is beaten. I don’t want to die on a table on the small hope of a longer life. I just want to live to see you get married.”
My fingers freeze over the keyboard.
Ophelia at the altar. Flowers in her hand, raindrops in her hair. Some ridiculous, thrifted, too-big, probably brown dress. Stuttered vows from nervous lips, and a lifetime of peace.
Even in my imagination, it’s hazy. Some distant future I’ll never deserve. I could dream of it until the last threads of sanity have slipped through my fingers.
But it’ll stay a dream. I haven’t the heart to tell my mother that, though. Or maybe I just can’t quite admit to myself that I’ve given up on it yet.
I start typing out an email in reply, ignoring the sixty new emails I’ve received since leaving the office. “I’ll put a call in their calendar.”
INGRID AND EMILY—THE housekeeper and the nanny—join Charlotte, Evie, Mia, Josie, Éléanor, and me at the table in the all-white dining room, the conversation surprisingly cheery. Ingrid is animatedly complaining about her husband, Russell, which is a terrible idea because Russell is our driver and Josie repeats everything she hears verbatim. But there’s no stopping her reenactment of Russell’s loud chewing, and it’s worth it to hear the girls laughing.
Ingrid is one of those people: like if home-cooked sauce with way too much oil, hugs that smell like old perfume, and coffee breath managed to manifest themselves into a human. And I mean that as a compliment. She’s worked here for years under the guise of being a housekeeper but doing so much more.
When my father would come home and take his frustrations about the supply chain out on me, she’d clumsily bumble into the kitchen long past her bedtime, taking half an hour to make herself a cup of tea just so he’d get bored enough to leave me alone.
And Josie won’t eat a sandwich that Ingrid didn’t make, so there isn’t much I wouldn’t do to keep her around.
Fleur and Freddie come down when we’re all halfway through our dinner. Freddie is still pulling his Ralph Lauren quarter zip on when they come in, which makes me want to put my knife in his retina. His blond hair is slicked back, his chinos perfectly pressed. Just another Shawn Miller lookalike. Idiot. I give him a brief nod, for Fleur’s sake.
“Hey, bro. Loved your shareholder statement yesterday.”
“Cheers,” I mutter, even though I want to tell him to find a more impressive hobby than watching press conferences at eighteen years old. “Take a seat. There’s enough food.”
He does, flicking his stupid hair out of his eyes.
“So, are you thinking of college, Freddie?”
“Nah, probably not. I’ll probably start a business, or a podcast, or something.”
Fucking hell. Code red. He’s a wannabe podcaster.
“I think you should both at least consider it,” I suggest. Fleur rolls her eyes, as tired of this conversation as I am. “Shut up, Alex.”
“Fleur!” scolds Mia, pushing back her curtain of thick, dark hair to glare at her. I shake my head at her, trying to defuse the situation. Mia, more than any of us, has inherited Dad’s stubbornness, never one to turn down a confrontation.
“You’re not my parent, Mia.” Her gaze lands on me. Fleur’s interest in any form of relationship with me died the day I, in her mind, chose Green over her and my sisters when the article went live. “And neither are you.”
“Legally, I am.” For now. Until Mom is better.
Mom’s not getting better.
“I bet you love that, don’t you? A chance to turn into him.”
“Fleur,” I warn, tone sharp.
“But you are, aren’t you?” She checks her watch. It’s well past 9 p.m. Way too late for a seven-year-old to be eating. “Late dinner, again? Another shareholder to appease? Another meeting running over?”
“Fleur,” snaps Mia, slamming down her cutlery. “You should be grateful he’s trying to hold this family together.”
“He’s coming home late, putting Green first. He chose the share price over us when we needed him most. When we could’ve died because of our own father, he chose to run to the New York office.Sound familiar?”
The food turns to ash in my mouth. Little pieces of the monster inside me slip into my bloodstream, but just like they always have, they stay just there. I couldn’t lash out at them even if I wanted to, can’t let that black cloud fill this dining room and suffocate my sisters. So, it eats me from the inside out instead.
I need to fix this before there’s nothing left of me at all.
I’m desperate to leave the table. Desperate to storm away and lock myself in the office and prove Fleur right. But I don’t. I stay and listen as she fires her bitter hatred at me, because leaving would make me my father, and I can’t do that to them.
“I’m very sorry you feel that way about me, Fleur,” I manage, as she pauses for air.
I don’t blame her. I went to New York and my father gave her a black eye. I went to New York, and Fleur used her debit card to hide all of my sisters in a hotel in Paris when an army of cameras and reporters gathered on the street outside. I chose New York, and Fleur stood between my father’s fury and our housekeeper.
I can analyze whether I made the right or wrong decision as much as I like, but it won’t change the fact that they needed me and I wasn’t there.
Mia credits me with holding the family together, but it was Fleur who controlled the explosion. I’m just tightening the knots she tied under astronomical pressure. It’s me who’s booking physicians appointments, ensuring the fridge is full, keeping security tight, catching up with schoolteachers, and interviewing nannies, but it’s Fleur who’s doing the work that the staff cannot.
She’s the one dealing with my sisters’ friendship dramas, the confidence issues, and all the difficulties that accompany being a teenage girl. She’s the one that does the things my mother did before her sharp decline in the last two years. It shouldn’t have to be her, but it is.
Fleur and I are on the same team, but we’re both drowning.
“Maybe Ophelia wants to kiss you again, Ally,” interjects Josie, helpfully. I lean over and wipe the sauce from her chin.
“What makes you say that?”
“Someone made an edit of your shareholder press conference,” says Evie, seemingly as desperate for a conversation change as I am.
“An edit?”
“Yeah, like edited clips of you with music.”
That doesn’t sound sexy, but I’ll take it as a much-needed win.
“It’s a new age for Green Aviation, and I’m privileged to be a part of it,” says Éléanor, mimicking my voice. Even Fleur laughs a little.
“Fuck you all,” I say, the mood lighter.
“It’s a new age for Green Aviation,” repeats Charlotte, undoing the top button of her blouse and flexing her shoulders.
“Oh my god,” I mumble around my dinner, but it’s drowned out by laughter. Every time I almost summon an ego, these idiots humble it back down again.
We manage dinner without another fight. Fleur doesn’t touch her pie, so I put it in a box in the fridge in the hope she’ll eat it later.
I get Josie and Charlotte to bed by ten thirty, catch up on a few emails, and miraculously still find the time to work out in the basement gym.
“It’s a school night,” I say, racking the weights as Mia bumbles in with her giant water flask and a bag of chips at almost midnight. My frustration is unconvincing. Mia always joins me for a workout. I lift dumbbells and she usually lifts cookies into her mouth.
“I’m sorry about Fleur,” she says, sitting on the treadmill with her snacks.
I nudge her with the toe of my sneaker. “Move, squirt. I’m about to run.” She shuffles onto the mat beside us, spilling chips over the belt. They crunch under my feet as I step onto it. “Have fun sweeping that up.”
She crunches another chip, preoccupied with her thoughts. “Ignore Fleur.”
“I don’t want to ignore her. Ignoring her got me into this mess. I want to help her.”
“Why didn’t you come, Alex?” she whispers, so quiet I barely catch it over the whir of the treadmill. I decrease the speed slightly so I can hear her better.
“I wanted to come, Mia. More than anything. But I was—am—so tired of him, desperate to clear him from our lives. If Green fell into the wrong hands, if one of his equally corrupt buddies became CEO, then Dad may as well have not been fired. He’d still have endless power, he’d have buried the articles, spun the story, bought more people’s silence. He’d still be fucking us all over—fucking Mom over, choosing her doctors, choosing her meds. I didn’t choose Green over any of you. I was choosing long-term safety.”
“What if Fleur got badly hurt?”
Lord, give me the strength to cope with my sisters. “God, Mia. I had to make a decision, and I can’t change it. If I hadn’t taken Green . . . Dad would’ve taken his anger out on all of us.”
“Did he ever hit you?”
My eyes snap to hers, wide with alarm. Everything I thought I knew about their relationship tilts on its axis. “He hit you?”
“Never,” she whispers. “But your football bruises always coincided with the dips in the share price.”
I wince at the memories that flit through my mind. At cruel hands that should’ve been loving. “You’re sixteen, M. You shouldn’t even care what a share price is.”
“Oh, I don’t care. Like, at all.”
I grin through the burn in my legs. “Good.”
I crank up the speed again, hoping the fire in my legs will burn the confusing mixture of emotions in my chest.
Another day down. God knows how many to go.
I run until I can barely breathe out a goodnight to Mia when she leaves, until I’ve carved myself a shred of hope that I might be tired enough to fall asleep quickly tonight.
I got used to anchoring my own breathing to Ophelia’s, got used to wanting to fall asleep just to wake up beside her. The fierce copper of her hair was my sunrise, and those two torturous dimples at the base of her spine were my grip on reality.
Now just the weight of my confusion and regret sit on the pillow beside mine.
Ophelia’s betrayal isn’t enough to make me hate her. Article or not, I love her. I don’t know how to make that go away.
Excerpted from Daybreak by Autumn Woods. © 2026 by Autumn Woods. Used with permission of the publisher, Slowburn, an imprint of Zando, LLC.
Daybreak, by Autumn Woods will be released on July 28, 2026 from Zando. To preorder the book, click on the retailer of your choice:
AMAZON AUDIBLE BARNES & NOBLE BOOKS-A-MILLION BOOKSHOP APPLE BOOKS KOBO LIBRO.FM TARGET WALMART POWELL'S BOOKS HUDSON BOOKSELLERS GOOGLE PLAY EBOOKS.COM
