Chapter 19
Declan
The first time she cancelled, Declan didn’t question it. The message was short, which wasn’t unusual for Riley when she was focused on function rather than explanation.
Unable to attend. Rescheduling not required.
He read it, locked his phone, and got on with his day. Riley always had a reason for what she did. She wasn’t impulsive, and she certainly wasn’t careless with other people’s time. If she said she couldn’t make it, then she couldn’t make it. That was enough for him.
The second cancellation felt different, although he spent most of the afternoon pretending it didn’t.
By the time the message arrived, training had already started.
He’d unlocked the gym, set everything up, and gone through the first part of his morning before realising he’d been looking towards the entrance every few minutes without meaning to.
It wasn’t something he’d consciously noticed until his phone lit up and he found himself expecting her name.
Unable to attend.
Declan stared at the screen for a moment before typing back.
All good. Let me know when you’re back.
Then he put the phone away and got on with things. The problem was that he kept catching himself looking at the door afterwards anyway.
By the third day, there wasn’t even a cancellation.
What unsettled him wasn’t the missed session itself so much as the silence around it.
Riley wasn’t exactly known for emotional transparency, but she was consistent.
Even when she was blunt, distracted, awkward, or operating entirely on efficiency, she communicated.
The silence felt different. Once he’d noticed it, he couldn’t stop noticing it. He made it through most of the day before finally sending a message himself.
Hey. You okay?
The text sat there unanswered. Declan told himself not to be ridiculous. Riley was clearly busy. She had a life outside of him, outside of the project, outside of the strange little routine they’d built over the last few months.
That explanation made perfect sense. Unfortunately, it didn’t stop him checking his phone every time it buzzed.
It also didn’t stop him thinking about her. The memory of their kisses had a habit of showing up whenever he wasn’t expecting it. Halfway through a client session. Standing in line for coffee, as he was grocery shopping.
As the days stretched into a week, he started wondering whether she’d gone home from the AFL gala, analysed their relationship from every conceivable angle, and reached a conclusion he wasn’t part of.
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.
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.