Page 26 of The Prime-Time Experiment

Riley’s fingers tightened slightly around the phone. The statement was obvious, unnecessary, and for a brief second she considered saying exactly that. Instead, she exhaled through her nose.

“I am aware.”

A pause followed. Not long, but long enough to register.

“That wasn’t how today was supposed to go.”

Riley’s gaze flicked briefly toward Dee, then back down again, trying to focus more on the wool, at least that was something she could control.

“That is an inaccurate assumption,” she said. “Today proceeded exactly as the environment dictated.”

“Right,” he replied, and there was something different in his tone now that was less performative, more direct. “I’m going to need you to tell me what that means.”

Riley stilled, body growing taut. Of all the things that she expected from this conversation, him asking for clarification was not one that she expected.

“It means,” she said, slower now, re-calibrating as she spoke, “that the conditions were not conducive to controlled application. The variability exceeded functional limits.”

There was a brief pause.

“Okay.”

She blinked once. Was he… Okay? Declan, who had spent the entire day deliberately disrupting her structure, was just…

“Okay?” she repeated.

“Yeah,” he said. There was a small shift in his tone, less flippant, more grounded. “So, we fix that.”

Riley’s focus sharpened immediately, suspicion threading through the space between them. “That is not a unilateral decision.”

“Didn’t say it was,” he replied. “I’m asking what you need.”

Silence stretched for a second too long. Across from her, Dee didn’t move, but Riley could feel the shift in her attention, the quiet expectation. Waiting, watching to see what Riley would do with it.

Riley looked down at the wool in her hands, at the knots she had already loosened and the ones still too tight to pull without care.

She couldn’t tell if he was being serious, but his tone had changed. It had dropped, lost the lightness she had come to associate with him. It was steadier now, more deliberate. She could almost picture it, his brows drawn slightly together, attention fully engaged in a way she hadn’t actually seen from him before.

It didn’t align with anything she had observed, which made it all the harder to dismiss.

“You were introducing additional variables,” she said finally. “Unnecessarily.”

A quiet huff of breath came through the phone. Amusement, unsubtle but softer than before. “Alright,” he said. “That might be fair.”

“Might be?”

He let out a low chuckle. “I was seeing how you’d respond, Riles.”

The words struck clean, too clean. Riley’s fingers stilled completely.

“If you were wanting to test a hypothesis about me, that was not an appropriate method of assessment.”

“No,” he said, and this time there was no easy agreement in it, just a quiet exhale, like he already knew that. “Yeah. I know.”

A brief pause followed, but it didn’t feel controlled. It felt like he was thinking in real time.

“I just—” he started, then stopped, like he was trying to find a version of this that didn’t make him sound like a complete idiot. “You’re so locked into structure all the time, and I wanted to see what happened when it wasn’t there.”

Riley’s grip tightened slightly around the phone. “You interfered with the conditions to the point of dysfunction,” she said. “That invalidates any outcome.”