I finally solved this problem in my desktop by having two separate M2 drives, one for Windows and one for Linux. Boot & grub live on the Linux drive and Windows never touches it.
With Linux and Windows on one drive, this is super annoying.
Ha, I recently upgraded to an nvme drive from SATA, cloned the drive and then realised I need to move the windows partition all the way to the end to let me expand the Linux partition. Which broke windows. After about 2-3 hours of troubleshooting it was working again. It was around then I realised I hadn't booted into windows in 2 years!
You have another slot most likely, it's just populated by the Wifi card, If you're willing to sacrifice that and use one of those tiny USB wifi adapters you can use that as your second slot with a little adapter to convert between E key to M key. Also have to use a 2230 SSD since the longer ones won't fit in the spot.