When up-and-coming model Isabelle meets talented but jaded photographer Milo, sparks fly despite their age difference. Their romance becomes the talk of the New York City fashion scene, fueling rumors and speculation about their scandalous affair. A...
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Her mom was concerned.
"It's not the end of the world," she kept saying.
Her dad, detached from it, not sure how to help.
Every night Isabelle would cry.
The first night she passed out quick, exhausted physically and emotionally.
For the next two days, she drifted through the familiar rhythms of her parents' house like a ghost, the stillness of the desert amplifying her internal chaos. She revisited old diaries, tracing the lines of a "dating checklist" she had once meticulously crafted, a poignant reminder of the clarity she once sought in love. Milo, with his elusive communication and unsettling behavior, seemed to mock every carefully listed criterion.
The only thing that pierced through the haze of her regret was the video they took that night before the marriage, the marriage iteslf, all the shit inthat's hers in his apartment and what remained of their work together. Her manager's excited calls about the billboards and magazine spreads, featuring her in the very wedding dresses Milo had photographed her in, felt like a cruel joke. "Fantastic for your career!" her manager beamed, oblivious to the painful irony. But for Isabelle, seeing her image, a public display of intimate moments captured by Milo's lens, was a constant, stinging "reminder of her pain". The vulnerability she had shown for his art now felt exposed and cheapened.
By the end of the third day, the silence from Milo was deafening, a vacuum that sucked all hope from her. She paced her room, a "caged tiger" once more, the weight of their unresolved marriage and his chilling words pressing down on her. The quiet of her apartment in New York would have felt just as empty. Her attempts to rationalize his guardedness, to remember his expressions of care and desire to "grow together," clashed violently with the recent memory of his cold detachment. The doubt and anguish were a physical burden.
Driven by a desperate need for answers, for something, she picked up her phone. Her fingers hovered over his contact, then, with a surge of a familiar, self-sabotaging courage, she typed a text. "Hey, will you be around next weekend in New York? I'll be back and I want to talk." She hit send, then threw the phone across the bed, waiting. And waiting.
Hours later, still nothing.
Her mom would shake her head in disbelief, "what did you do?" She would ask.
"I just left," Isabelle snarled. That's all.
It all started tocome back to her. How he couldn't handle when she was away, how he would never ask her deeper things. How he would monologue. How sex was jsut for him.
She teeter tottered between anger and pain, loneliness and frustration.
She tried calling two days later, her hands shaking with anxiety, her heart leaping with each ring, each silence stretching into an eternity. Nothing
Her breath hitched. The quiet rage that had been simmering within her for days finally erupted. She typed one last message, fueled by a mixture of anger and a fading hope for common decency: "I respect you need space but I would appreciate if you can respond so we can make a plan."
Still, nothing from Milo. The finality of his silence, the utter disregard for her feelings, solidified a chilling realization. There was no plan. There was only the "unsteady ground" she walked on alone, and a desperate, defiant urge to reclaim some control. With a fierce resolve, she decided: she was going anyway.
