Page 90 of The Prime-Time Experiment

He hated that possibility more than he wanted to admit. The formal withdrawal arrived through his lawyer’s office later that day. The email itself was exactly what he would have expected from Riley if she’d been trying to remove every trace of emotion from a decision.

Due to changes in capacity, I will be withdrawing from the current agreement, effective immediately.

Declan read it once then again, some stubborn part of him thinking that if he read it again, he would see an explanation beyond the surface: anything that sounded remotely personal.

There was nothing. His lawyer was talking about contractual obligations and administrative processes, but Declan barely heard a word of it. All he could think about was how impossible the last month felt when he lined it up in his head.

A few weeks earlier Riley had been standing in the doorway of the gym looking at him like she’d reached a decision she didn’t entirely understand herself. Now he was sitting in a lawyer’s office reading a formal withdrawal written in language so detached it could have been referring to a complete stranger.

The distance between those two realities made absolutely no sense. For the first time since meeting her, he had no idea what she was thinking. That bothered him far more than the withdrawal itself.

He could have called her. God knew he’d thought about it often enough. Half the time he was one bad day away from getting in his car and driving across the city just so he could ask her what the hell had happened.

The only thing stopping him was the fact that he knew her. If Riley was creating distance, pushing harder wasn’t going to bring her closer. It would just make her retreat further.

So he left her alone. That didn’t mean it stopped getting to him.

His mum noticed before anybody else, she always did. Declan wasn’t moping around the house or dramatically staring out windows. He still trained clients, still turned up to family dinners and participated in conversations.

But something was off with him, which he realised anyone who knew him beyond social media would be able to notice.

More than once he caught himself reaching for his phone before remembering there was nobody he was expecting to hear from. He’d see something that reminded him of her and immediately think about telling her before remembering that he couldn’t. Twice he found himself looking towards empty corners of the gym where she’d normally be sitting with her laptop before his brain caught up with reality.

The second week, his mother found him standing in the kitchen after dinner with a glass of water he’d forgotten to drink. Declan stared vaguely into space, before feeling a buzz in his pocket and pulling it out to check. His mother folded her arms.

“Alright.”

He looked up. “Alright what?”

“You’ve checked that phone about six times in ten minutes.” Declan glanced down at the device still sitting in his hand. That wasn’t helping his case. “What’s going on?”

Declan glanced up, like he hadn’t expected to be pulled out of it. For a second, he thought about brushing it off, saying nothing, moving past it like he always did.

But he couldn’t with this. His gaze dropped again, his jaw tightening slightly as he exhaled through his nose. Leanne moved closer to him.

“I knew something was wrong the moment you walked back in this house,” she said quietly. “You feel like a stranger in it.”

His brow pulled faintly, his grip tightening slightly around the glass before loosening again. “I’m fine,” he said, but there was no weight behind it.

“You’re a terrible liar when you care about something,” she said. “Always have been.”

Declan let out a quiet breath, his head tipping back slightly as he stared up at the ceiling, like he was weighing whether to say it out loud or keep carrying it on his own.

“She pulled out,” he said.

Leanne stilled. “Riley?”

He nodded once. “Of everything,” he added, voice lower now. “Training, the contract. Didn’t say anything. Just… sent an email to my legal team.”

The words felt wrong even coming out of his mouth. Clinical, like something Riley would do if she’d decided emotional detachment was safer than explanation.

Declan dragged a hand over the back of his neck and paced once across the kitchen before stopping again. He couldn’t seem to settle anywhere properly.

“It doesn’t make sense,” he said, quieter now, more to himself than anyone else. “I was there. I saw what happened with Dee and Tyler. It got heated, yeah, but it wasn’t anything to do with her.” He couldn’t control the furrow of his brows as they drew together in frustration.

“She’s just cut me out for three weeks straight,” he said. “Like I…” He stopped abruptly, the sentence catching awkwardly in his throat before he forced himself to finish it. “Like we didn’t matter.”

Even saying it out loud made something heavy twist low in his chest, because that was the part he couldn’t reconcile. Riley didn’t do shallow. Even when she fought him on everything, even when she acted like he was the most irritating person alive, she still showed up.