Page 63 of The Prime-Time Experiment

Instead, hers taught her fear so thoroughly it had settled into the very aspect of her nervous system. She learned the weight of his footsteps before she learned multiplication tables, learned how to identify danger through silence alone; the particular stillness that meant something was shifting, that the atmosphere inside the house had become unstable again.

Every system she built for herself afterwards, every routine, every obsession with precision and predictability and facts, had not emerged from preference alone. They had been her shelter.

If she could understand everything, perhaps nothing could ambush her. If she could control enough variables, perhaps she could finally rest. But beneath all of it was a little girl trying desperately to create safety out of things that could not abandon her the way people had.

Because people had. Her mother was gone before Riley had even fully understood what loss meant, leaving behind an absence so large it reshaped everything around it. And afterwards, there was no softness waiting for her on the other side of grief. No one steady enough to absorb her fear and tell her she was still held, still loved. Still safe.

Only him, a man so consumed by his own resentment and instability that he looked at his daughter and saw a reminder of what had been taken from him rather than the child who had lost everything too.

The cruelty of that settled into her chest with unbearable force.

She had been small and frightened and alone, and nobody had protected her from the person who should have protected her most. Nobody had stepped in when she started disappearing into herself, into logic.

And suddenly the kindness she had been shown recently felt almost impossible to hold inside her without breaking apart beneath the weight of it. Dee holding her like she was something precious instead of difficult. Declan looking at her with patience instead of frustration when she struggled. Leanne offering care so instinctively it carried no transaction beneath it at all.

Care offered freely, without conditions attached to it, this was what true love was supposed to feel like. Safe. She was safe.

The tears kept coming, uneven and unfamiliar against her skin, but Riley stopped trying to contain them. Stopped trying to reorganise herself fast enough to regain control before anyone noticed.

Instead, she let herself stay there in the grief of it, in the mourning.

And for the first time in her life, Riley allowed herself to grieve her childhood not as something she survived successfully, but as something that should never have happened to her at all.

Chapter 14

Declan

Declan stopped pretending he wasn’t waiting for her.

The first few weeks he’d managed to convince himself it was coincidence. Riley arrived at roughly the same time every morning, which meant it made sense for him to be upstairs near the door around then. It made sense for him to finish whatever he was doing before her first client observation. It made sense for him to have coffee made.

At some point those explanations had stopped holding up under scrutiny, because Riley wasn’t due for another seven minutes and he’d already checked the time twice.

Declan wasn’t usually the sort of person who paid attention to details, that always seemed more like Riley’s territory than his. She was the one who noticed patterns, the one who could spend an hour watching a room and walk away with conclusions nobody else saw.

But somewhere along the way he’d started doing it too. At first he’d told himself it was practical, the experiment required observation. Understanding how she worked made the sessions run smoother. That explanation had lasted maybe a week.

It didn’t explain why he’d noticed she carried her laptop on her left shoulder unless she’d had a particularly long day, or why he’d learned that she preferred hot coffee on the mornings she wasn’t going to be training that day, and iced coffee on the days she was. It didn’t explain why he’d started keeping track of those things in the first place.

It definitely didn’t explain why he’d started looking for the tiny tilt of her head whenever something genuinely interested her. The first time he’d noticed it, he’d thought it was accidental. It wasn’t. She did it every time. Every single time. And somehow that knowledge had lodged itself in his brain alongside things that were actually supposed to matter.

Which was probably a problem.

Because lately, it felt like half the things he knew about Riley had become important simply because they belonged to her.

Riley came up the front path with her usual purposeful stride, sunlight catching briefly against her hair before she stepped beneath the shade of the verandah.

His shirt hung off her shoulders. Declan’s gaze snagged on it immediately. Christ, it was just a shirt. A black training shirt he’d owned for years, one of about twenty almost identical shirts sitting in his wardrobe.

Except it wasn’t sitting in his wardrobe. It was hanging loose on Riley, the sleeves falling lower on her arms than they did on him, the hem brushing the tops of her thighs. She’d rolled the sleeves once to keep them out of the way and, for reasons he couldn’t begin to justify, that detail alone had occupied an unreasonable amount of space in his brain over the last week.

The stupid part was how much he liked it, not because it looked good—although it absolutely did—it was the fact she’d kept wearing it.

He’d offered it as a practical solution to a sensory issue, that was all. Riley didn’t do things for sentiment. Riley did things because they were useful, which meant every morning she walked through his front door wearing one of his shirts, she was unknowingly carrying around physical proof that he’d solved a problem for her.

And every time he saw it, something deeply possessive and entirely unhelpful lit up inside his chest. It was ridiculous. He was a grown man, and yet somehow Riley borrowing a shirt had become the highlight of his morning.

By the time she reached the verandah, he was already opening it. Riley looked up. There was never any surprise in her expression when she found him there, as though she expected him. As though, somewhere in that relentlessly organised brain of hers, Declan opening the door had become part of the routine.