Page 99 of The Prime-Time Experiment

The words felt clearer once they were spoken. Dee blinked. “You’re what?”

Riley shook her head slightly, her breath catching again as she tried to organise it into something coherent.

“Do you regret it?” The question left her mouth before she could reconsider it.

Dee blinked. “Regret what, Ri?”

“Choosing to be my friend.”

The room seemed to still around the words. Riley held Dee’s gaze despite the pressure building behind her ribs.

“I understand that my presence requires accommodation,” she continued. “I have always understood that.”

The certainty she’d carried for years sat heavily in her chest now. “You have to constantly explain things other people understand instinctively. You interpret social situations I cannot. You adjust your communication, you account for me.” She swallowed. “I was assessing whether the benefit justified the cost of having me in your life.”

For a moment, Dee simply stared at her. Then asked, very quietly, “Riley, where did you get that idea?”

Riley hesitated. The answer wasn’t simple, it wasn’t a single conversation or a single person. It wasn’t something she could point to and isolate. It was years of noticing, until eventually, the conclusion had stopped feeling like a theory. It had become a fact.

“I derived it,” she said.

Dee closed her eyes briefly. When she opened them again, there was something heartbreakingly sad in her expression.

“Oh, Riley.” Dee let out a slow breath, shaking her head slightly in disbelief. “That’s what you think this is?”

Riley didn’t answer immediately because, if she was being honest, the conclusion had always seemed self-evident.

Dee moved through the world with an ease Riley had never been able to replicate. She understood people instinctively, navigated conversations without appearing to think about them, and seemed capable of recognising what someone needed long before they said it out loud. Riley had spent years watching her do it, watching her move through social situations that felt impossibly complex as though they followed rules everyone else had received except her.

Riley understood systems. Dee understood people. The distinction had always felt obvious.

Over time she had learned to compensate for it the same way she compensated for everything else. She became useful. She remembered details other people forgot, solved problems before they became problems, and made herself someone worth keeping around.

The thought had never seemed cruel, it had only ever seemed true. Across from her, Dee had gone completely still. Dee stared at her for another second before pressing the heel of her hand against her forehead.

“Oh my god.” The words came out softly, carrying a kind of disbelief that seemed to deepen rather than fade the longer she looked at Riley. “You really do.”

Riley’s attention sharpened. She could see the shift happening in Dee in real time, the way her posture changed, the way emotion entered the conversation with a force Riley hadn’t anticipated.

“You’re not a project,” Dee said, shaking her head. “You’re not something I manage, and you’re definitely not some emotional responsibility I’ve decided is worth carrying.”

Riley opened her mouth to respond, but Dee wasn’t finished. Her eyes glossed before she could stop it, her voice softening but not losing its intensity. “You are the only person I’ve ever known who lets me be exactly who I am,” Dee said, and Riley could hear the strain in her voice.

She looked away briefly before continuing, as though the words were easier to say if she wasn’t forced to watch Riley absorb them.

“Most people want a version of me, the fun version. The easy version, the version that never gets angry or overwhelmed.” Her laugh was small and humourless. “You’ve never asked for that.”

Riley’s fingers curled slightly against the couch cushion.

“You let me say things when they’re messy. You let me be upset without trying to fix it. You don’t decide what I should be feeling before I’ve even figured it out myself.”

Something shifted painfully in Riley’s chest.

“And I love that about you.”

The words didn’t strike her the way compliments usually did. They didn’t bounce harmlessly off the surface of her understanding while she searched for the socially appropriate response. Instead, they settled somewhere deeper, somewhere she couldn’t immediately analyse or organise, and that made them far more difficult to dismiss.

Riley’s throat tightened. She tried to respond, but nothing came out cleanly.