Page 91 of The Prime-Time Experiment

So this? This felt deliberate, like she’d looked at whatever existed between them and decided it was easier to amputate it entirely than risk keeping it.

“That’s not true.”

Declan let out a short breath at that, humourless and tired. “Then why does it feel like it is?”

Silence stretched for a second. “Because she’s protecting something.”

The words made him look up immediately.

“And you’re standing on the outside of it.”

Declan frowned slightly, his gaze dropping again as the thought settled somewhere uncomfortable in his chest.

“From me?” he asked quietly.

Leanne shook her head once. “No,” she said. “From what happened.”

A beat passed, then another, before she exhaled sharply and pushed herself upright, her patience snapping clean through.

“And I swear to god,” she added, voice tightening, “when he gets back from finals, I am going to ring Tyler’s scrawny little neck for putting all of you in this position.”

Declan blinked, thrown slightly by the shift. “Mum—”

“No,” she cut in, sharply enough to stop him from continuing his thoughts. “He doesn’t get to say something like that to Dee and act like it meant nothing. And he definitely doesn’t get to blow up whatever this was between you and Riley because he couldn’t get a handle on himself for five bloody minutes.”

Declan’s jaw tightened further, but he didn’t argue. His mother picked up a cloth to wipe the already spotless kitchen bench, frustration clear now in the restless movement of her hands.

“That girl doesn’t disappear from everything for no reason,” she continued. “Not from what you’ve told me. Not with the way she thinks. Walking away like that would only happen if it cost her something.”

Declan’s put his glass on the kitchen bench, leaning into the bench with his hands, the thought landing hard enough to knock the breath from his chest.

Cost her something. Protecting something. Protecting Dee. The pieces slammed together all at once.

The panic on Riley’s face during the argument, the way her body had folded inward. Ending the contract and cutting his family off. It wasn’t because she didn’t care, it was because she cared too much.

“It cost her Dee,” he said quietly.

And suddenly he could see it from her side with awful clarity. Riley taking that night and tracing impossible lines between cause and effect until she’d convinced herself she was responsible for all of it.

If she hadn’t come into their lives, if she hadn’t mattered to him enough to become important to everyone else too, maybe none of it would’ve happened.

“Fuck,” Declan muttered under his breath, posture stilling as the full weight of it settled over him.

“She wouldn’t cut you out because you didn’t matter, Declan.”

The words hit differently now, because Riley pulling away suddenly felt less like rejection and more like sacrifice, the kind she would absolutely make if she thought it protected the people she loved.

His gaze dropped to the glass on the bench, watching a bead of condensation melt along the side while his thoughts rewired themselves around a truth he should have understood sooner.

Riley hadn’t left because she didn’t care, she’d left because she did. Because something in her had decided protecting Dee mattered more than what it would cost her to stay with Declan.

And Christ, that was such a painfully Riley thing to do it made his chest ache. She loved like it was survival. Carefully at first, cautious, like she was waiting for permission from her body to trust it. But once she chose someone, she chose them completely. She would cut out pieces of her heart before she risked being the reason the people she loved got hurt.

Declan swallowed hard. “It’s not supposed to hurt like this,” he admitted quietly, more to himself than anyone else.

But it did. Every day without her felt wrong in this low, constant way he couldn’t escape from. Something essential had been removed from his life and his body couldn’t figure out how to function around the absence of it: of her.

And underneath the grief sat something else now, understanding. Dee had been her oxygen for eight years, and now he had to prove he was someone she could breathe around too. Someone worth leaving for instead of leaving behind.