Page 106 of The Prime-Time Experiment

The word landed warm and familiar, settling somewhere deep inside her before she could protect herself from it.

“Hi,” Riley answered softly. Her voice sounded different to her own ears, thinner around the edges. Emotional in a way she usually would have corrected immediately.

Declan sat down carefully, leaving space between them instead of assuming he could close it himself. The gesture hit harder than she expected. Even now, after everything, he was still giving her room, still letting her decide what happens next.

The silence that settled between them wasn’t awkward. It was too full for that. It carried the weight of the past few weeks, the distance she had forced between them, the confusion, the hurt, the things she had left unsaid because she hadn’t known how to survive saying them out loud.

Riley felt the familiar instinct to structure it before she spoke, to organise every thought into something logical before she handed it over. But she was exhausted by that version of herself. So instead, she inhaled shakily and spoke before she could retreat back behind it.

“I have a lot to say,” she admitted, her voice quieter now, honest. “And I don’t think it’s going to come out properly.” Her fingers curled lightly against her jeans beneath the table. “But I need you to hear it anyway.”

For a second, Declan just looked at her. “Okay,” he said finally, calm and certain. “I’m here.”

The words landed somewhere deep enough to hurt, because he still was. After everything she put him through, he still was.

Riley nodded once, more to herself than to him, and then she began.

“Ebony told me you didn’t stop the experiment,” she said, her voice gaining steadiness as she moved into something she could anchor to. “She said you continued to send the videos, that she has been taking the notes.”

Declan’s expression didn’t change much, but something softened in it. He exhaled quietly, his gaze dropping for a moment before returning to hers. “It mattered to you,” he said.

The simplicity of it pressed into her chest in a way that didn’t resolve cleanly. Riley swallowed, her throat tightening as she moved past it, needing to get it all off of her chest. “Thank you for that.” She took a breath and started unravelling her thoughts in real time.

“I removed you from my life not because you did something wrong, but because I believed I was preventing instability.” Her gaze dropped briefly, then lifted again, holding his. “I now know I was wrong.”

Riley looked at him for a long moment, her chest tight enough that breathing properly still felt unfamiliar. Then she took a breath anyway, gathered what little courage she had left and began again.

“When I was younger,” she said, slower now, the words seeming to come from somewhere deeper than the place in her head that usually organised them, “I did not think I was capable of being loved.”

Her throat tightened, but she kept going. “My mother died when I was born from complications with my birth. My parents had both been foster children, so my father had no other family, it left him alone.” Her fingers curled once against her own arm, then loosened again. “He never really recovered from losing her.”

Declan’s posture changed, tightening through his shoulder, his jaw locking hard as he forced himself to keep still and let her say it.

“He drank a lot,” Riley said quietly. “And when he did, he blamed me for her death.”

The words sat heavily in the air between them. What she had told Ebony earlier had been true, but it had not been the whole story of it. Riley drew in a breath that trembled slightly at the edges.

“For most of my childhood, it was neglect. A mix of physical violence and emotional abuse.” Her voice wavered once, then steadied by force. “But as I got older, it changed.” She swallowed hard, her fingers pressing into her arm hard enough to ground herself through the sting of it. “I started to look like her,” she said carefully. “Enough that sometimes he would forget I wasn’t.”

Her breath faltered. “He’d come into my room,” she continued, the words coming out weaker than she’d hoped. “Or find me hiding somewhere in the house and touch me like I was—” She stopped. For one horrible second, she felt like she should retreat from it again, but she forced herself to say it plainly.

“He sexually assaulted me.” The words landed heavy and absolute between them. Declan went completely still.

“And he was not angry when he did it.” The words thinner now, like they were scraping against something raw on the way out. “That was the worst part.” Her throat tightened hard enough that she had to force the next breath in. “The only time I ever saw him happy… truly happy… was when he thought she was alive again. When he was violating me.”

Declan’s expression changed instantly. Something horrified flashed across his face before he forced it back down. His hand curled hard against the table, tendons pulling tight beneath the skin like he was physically restraining himself from reacting too quickly, too violently.

Riley kept looking at him because she had already crossed the point of retreat. There was nowhere softer to place the truth now.

“That is what made it so difficult to understand,” she continued, her voice fraying slightly at the edges. “Love. Wanting people. The idea that someone could care for you without eventually turning that closeness into something harmful.”

Her breath broke unevenly. Riley’s eyes burned, her vision beginning to blur again, but she didn’t look away from him. Couldn’t.

“I left on my eighteenth birthday,” she said, quieter now. “I packed a bag the night before and waited until midnight because I needed it to be legal first.”

Declan looked wrecked by the time she finished, devastated in a way that looked almost unbearable to hold. Anger sat underneath it too, dense and dangerous, directed entirely at the man who had taught her to associate love with fear before she had ever been given the chance to learn otherwise.

“When I met Dee,” Riley said softly, “she was the first person who kept choosing me without having to.” A small, disbelieving breath left her. “And I never really understood why.”