Page 47 of The Prime-Time Experiment

Her childhood had consisted of three baser instincts: React. Retreat. Disappear.

She learned quickly how to make herself smaller. Quieter, less noticeable. How to fold herself into corners of rooms, behind furniture, anywhere that lowered the likelihood of attention landing on her.

Stillness was safer than movement. Silence was safer than speaking. But eventually, it stopped being that simple.

The shift had happened slowly enough that she never recognised it while it was occurring. Then one day, he was simply different. He smiled at her, cried that he loved her. But her name wasn’t the one he called in those moments.

“Vanessa!”

The disconnect had been so complete that it took multiple incidents before Riley consciously understood that Vanessa was her mother’s name. Until then, she had never heard him say her mother’s name out loud. Riley had only ever understood, with the brutal simplicity children reduce things to and what her father had said, was that she was the reason her mother had been taken away from him. He had believed that his love had come back to save him from his torment, and that was when Riley learned she looked like her mother.

The attention he gave would then come without warning; without anything she could predict or prepare herself for beforehand. Hands lingering where they were never supposed to. Touch that crossed lines she was too young to name but understood instinctively were wrong. Pressure that lasted too long and hurt too much. Fingers against her skin in ways that made panic climb instantly into her throat.

Her body recognised the danger long before her mind had language for what he was doing to her. Wrong. The reaction had always been immediate. Panic.

She would fight first, kicking hard enough to bruise herself against furniture, her nails clawing at skin. Twisting violently in his grip with the desperate, animal instinct to get away no matter what it cost her. Her screams would tear themselves raw in her throat, breath breaking unevenly between sobs and gasping air that never felt like enough.

But he never seemed to fully register it. Or worse, he did, and translated it into something else entirely through the haze of alcohol and grief and whatever broken fantasy he disappeared into whenever he touched her. Like he wasn’t seeing his daughter at all, just seeing echoes of someone he’d lost. She’d never know.

She assumed it was some warped attempt at comfort or resolution that existed entirely inside his own head, and that part stayed with her longest, the disconnect between what was happening to her and the strange softness that would sometimes settle over him afterwards, like he had found some temporary moment of peace in it.

While she sat there shaking, often bleeding, ruined a little more each time.

Her lungs would tighten until breathing itself became painful, every nerve-ending in her body hypersensitive to touch, pressure, movement. The overwhelming need to escape colliding constantly with the terror that resisting too much could make things worse. But sometimes, she hadn’t known what to do and had frozen.

She would always be ashamed that she had, because even now, years later, freezing still felt indistinguishable from failure. She had failed. She had failed to remove his phantom hands from her skin, even after scrubbing herself raw.

She had been living safely out of that house for almost ten years, but she found that time hadn’t healed her wounds. If anything, the distance between reality and nightmares became more distinct, until eventually, it had been enough for her to function again.

Riley surfaced from the memory just enough to realise her fingernails were digging hard enough into her palms to hurt, crescents already embedded deep into the skin before she consciously registered she was doing it. Her hands loosened abruptly, breath catching unevenly as sensation crashed back into focus all at once.

Too hot. No, cold. Her body couldn’t settle on either. Heat prickled uncomfortably beneath her skin, while a sharp chill spread across the back of her neck and down her arms at the same time, nervous system overwhelmed by too many competing mental inputs arriving simultaneously. She needed to think about something else, someone else.

Ebony. Riley forced her hands open properly this time, fingertips pressing deliberately against the fabric of her pants, grounding through texture and pressure she could identify concretely. The seam beneath her thumb, the steady weight of her feet against the floor.

And once her thoughts returned in sequence rather than fragments, the connection aligned almost immediately. This was about Ebony.

Riley’s chest tightened again, though differently this time. It was about Ebony growing up believing there was something fundamentally wrong with the way her brain experienced the world, when in reality it was adapting constantly to environments that demanded more from it than other people realised.

In Riley’s experience, that instability had been allowed to expand unchecked, altering everything around it until there had been nothing left to anchor against until she’d met Dee. Systems had not been reinforced, they had been left to collapse.

Ebony’s had not. It was not simply that Ebony had lost a parent like she had, it was that she had not been left to navigate the aftermath alone. She, unlike Riley, would never be left to suffer the way she had, because she had a support system that would care for her and ensure she’d never have to be hurt or blamed for being different.

Riley blinked once, the movement small and controlled, her attention returning fully to the present. The internal shift did not resolve completely, but it stabilised into something she could hold without it disrupting her outward composure.

When she looked back at Declan, watching her so intently and waiting for her to process his words, she understood how much that support would’ve changed her life if she had received that too. Her heart tugged with devastation

“I see,” she said.

Her tone remained even, but she felt it settle under her skin, the feeling almost unrecognisable.

“Are you okay?” he asked.

The question was simple, and yet the words made her unsteady momentarily, before grounding herself with a deep inhalation. Riley’s focus returned to him. “Yes,” she said.

It was not untrue, but she felt that it wasn’t the most truthful answer. She couldn’t explain it, but there was nothing that she could offer to explain why that had impacted her so much.

Declan held her gaze for a second longer, something in his expression suggesting he understood that the answer was incomplete. He didn’t challenge it or ask her to elaborate. He only nodded once, accepting what she had given without requiring more.