12
Izzy
It was strange, the way trust began.
Not with grand gestures or declarations.Not with vows or promises.It started small.A look held a second too long.A laugh shared at the right moment.The comfort of being seen—reallyseen—by someone who felt familiar before they were known.
You handed pieces of yourself over without ceremony.Your time.Your patience.Your belief that people were, at their core, decent.You told yourself that love meant loyalty, that standing by someone when they were struggling was proof of character, not a warning sign.
I had given him everything without realizing I was doing it.
My space.My money.My energy.
I told myself relationships weren’t meant to be easy, that love was work, and work sometimes looked like sacrifice.I filled in the gaps he left behind.I softened his rough edges with excuses.I ignored the quiet voice in my head because it was inconvenient and unromantic and didn’t fit the story I wanted to believe.
The truth didn’t arrive all at once.
It crept in.
It was the way he never quite explained where he’d been.The way his apologies were always vague but convincing.The way I learned to stop asking questions because the answers never sat right anyway.I adjusted.Adapted.Made myself smaller around the discomfort until it felt normal.
That was the most lethal part.
Because when something becomes normal, you stop questioning it.
You don’t notice when your standards lower.When your boundaries blur.When you begin measuring love by how much you’re willing to endure instead of how much you’re allowed to need.
And then one day, you wake up.
Not dramatically.Not with clarity crashing down like thunder.You wake up with a suffocating, awful understanding settling into your bones.A realization so sharp it makes your stomach turn.
You hadn’t been chosen.
You’d beenuseful.
The memories rearranged themselves after that.Conversations I’d defended.Behaviors I’d minimized.Red flags I’d painted beige so they blended into the background.What once felt like loyalty now looked like negligence—my own, directed inward.
I wasn’t stupid.
That was the part that hurt the most.
I hadn’t been foolish or reckless by nature.I had simply believed someone when they showed me the version of themselves they wanted me to see.I had loved with an open hand, and he had taken without ever intending to give back.
Trust, I realized, wasn’t something you lost in a single moment.
It was something that eroded carefully while you weren’t looking.
By the time you noticed the damage, it was already done.
I didn’t cry when Raze told me.
I thought I might—thought the words would knock the air out of me, split something open—but they didn’t.They settled instead.Wrong.Foreign.As though the truth had been circling me for a long time and had finally found a place to land.
Nathan Azzopardi.Drug runner.Mule.
Raze wasn’t the kind of man who dealt in misinformation.He didn’t posture or speculate.When he spoke, it was because he was certain.That knowledge alone made my stomach twist harder than the words themselves.
I’d believed Nathan was many things—selfish, unreliable, emotionally absent—but never that.Neverthat.