Disconfirmation #2
But nothing about this felt like before. There was no threat in it, no sharp instinct telling her to pull away or protect herself before something changed.
It was just Dee. Her friend, her safe place.
It took her a second to realise that it wasn’t their apartment that made her feel safe, it was her friend.
Riley’s breathing hitched again, uneven now, fracturing under the pressure building too fast inside her chest. And for once, there was nothing she could do with it.
No system to apply or structure to force around it tightly enough to contain it.
Her hands moved first, hesitant and uncertain, like her body was attempting the action before her mind had fully agreed to it. Then slowly, carefully, they settled against Dee’s back.
The contact didn’t hurt, that realisation alone almost undid her. It had taken her until these moments, years from what she endured with her father to realise it wasn’t touch that frightened her. It was him.
Riley’s grip tightened suddenly, fingers twisting into the fabric of Dee’s shirt as something inside her gave way all at once. Her breathing broke completely.
The first tear hit before she consciously realised it had fallen, followed immediately by another, then too many to separate as years of control ruptured under the unbearable weight of finally being safe enough to stop holding it all alone.
“This is not—” she tried again, her voice breaking this time, uneven and fragile in a way she didn’t recognise.
“It’s okay.” Dee’s hand moved gently to the back of her head, not pushing, just there. “You’re okay.”
Riley shook her head against her shoulder, her breath coming apart completely now. No, this wasn’t okay. It wasn’t controlled or efficient or her normal way of functioning, and yet she didn’t want to pull away. If anything, she felt the need to hold Dee tighter, and so she did.
“You’re safe,” Dee murmured again. “And you are loved.”
The tears came faster, her breathing uneven and unstructured, her body finally releasing something it had held too tightly for too long. Riley’s grip tightened, her forehead pressing lightly into Dee’s shoulder.
Her chest rose sharply as another wave moved through her, stronger this time, and she didn’t try to stop it. She let it move, even as her breathing struggled to keep up, because she could feel it now, clearer than before. This wasn’t panic, or something she had to be afraid to feel.
This was grief.
Not the contained, intellectualised version Riley had reduced everything into for years so it could be analysed instead of felt. Not something distant enough to observe safely from behind logic and clinical terminology.
This grief lived in her body; in the relentless tension she carried through every room she entered.
In the exhaustion of spending a lifetime monitoring tone, volume, movement, proximity.
In the instinctive understanding that safety was temporary, conditional and could disappear without warning if she stopped paying attention for even a second.
Because she had been a child, and she had been afraid in her own home.
The thought moved through her with devastating clarity now that she finally allowed herself to stay with it instead of turning away.
Children were supposed to feel safest with their parents, that was the shape the world was meant to have.
A father was supposed to be the person who made fear smaller.
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.