ANG TAONG AKALA NIYA SIYA ANG PINAKAMATALINO SA THAILAND… HANGGANG MAY NAKILALA SIYANG MAS MALALIM KAYSA LAHAT NG SCAMMER NA KINALKAL NIYA SA YOUTUBE.

My name is Marcus Vanderwe, and this is the story of how a 52-year-old cynical property developer—from one of the hardest cities in Africa—walked straight into a kind of trap he never saw coming, not because it was a scam, not because someone was after his money, but because someone was after something far more dangerous: the walls I spent my entire adult life building around myself. And for once, maybe for the first time in decades, someone walked right through those walls effortlessly, not because she broke them, but because I opened the door without realizing it.

I have lived my whole life believing one thing: everyone wants something from you. And in Johannesburg, that belief wasn’t pessimism—it was survival instinct. I made money buying distressed properties during some of South Africa’s ugliest economic years. While other people panicked as their mortgages collapsed, I swooped in, bought their foreclosures, renovated them cheaply, and sold them for a profit. It was smart business. It was strategic. And it worked. But it also hardened me into the kind of man who understood that the world didn’t give you anything unless it wanted something in return. After 20 years in real estate, a bitter divorce, two sons who barely spoke to me, and a lifetime of watching people smile at me with their hands open behind their backs, I was convinced that emotional distance was the smartest investment I ever made. And maybe it was—until it wasn’t.

My marriage died slowly, painfully, and predictably. My ex-wife, Annika, was brilliant, beautiful, and quick with emotions, things I was not. She used to tell me I treated the world like a business deal, like every person was an asset or a liability. When we divorced, she turned my sons against me. I don’t say that with anger. I say it as fact. She filled their heads with stories about how I was never around, how I cared more about my work than them. Maybe she was right. Maybe I was keeping them financially afloat while emotionally abandoning them. And maybe the hardest truth is that I didn’t know how to be a father any more than I knew how to be a husband. But either way, the damage was done. My sons grew up believing I was distant, cold, unloving. And eventually, I let them believe it because I didn’t know how to undo it. Repairing something requires vulnerability, and vulnerability wasn’t something I allowed myself. So I let them drift away. The texts became shorter. The phone calls stopped. Birthdays became formalities. Then silence became normal.

By 50, I had money, assets, security… but absolutely no peace. Johannesburg was a fortress city—you lived behind gates, electric fences, armed response signs. Every night you slept lightly, waiting for the sound of breaking glass, of alarms, of threats. Crime was a constant drumbeat, load shedding was routine, and everyone walked around exhausted from stress they pretended didn’t exist. I kept telling myself I was fine, that this was life, that I’d built everything I had through discipline and hard work. But at night, when the power cut and the house hummed with the sound of the generator, I felt the weight of everything I’d lost and everything I’d failed to build.

Then one night, with whiskey in hand, I watched a YouTube video: “Retire in Thailand on $1,500/month.” At first, I laughed. Scam. Tourist fantasy. Clickbait. But I watched it. Then another. Then ten more. Soon I wasn’t laughing. I was imagining. A place where life was warm, slow, inexpensive, peaceful. A place where I wouldn’t need a fortress to sleep. A place where the sun didn’t feel like a threat. A place where maybe I could breathe. But I wasn’t stupid. I didn’t just watch paradise videos. I watched the horror stories—the scams, the men who fell in love in a week, married in a month, and lost everything in a year. I watched the videos of “Sick Buffalo Scams,” bar girls with three foreign boyfriends sending money, gold shops in girlfriends’ mother’s names, and all the ways a clueless foreigner could get drained dry while smiling about it. I took notes. Learned the patterns. Studied the red flags like they were business contracts. I prepared myself not to be fooled. I convinced myself that if I ever went to Thailand, I’d be the one man who would see through everything.

After six months of research, I chose Phuket. Not Pattaya—too loud. Not Bangkok—too chaotic. Not Chiang Mai—too many digital nomads selling courses nobody asked for. Phuket felt just right. I rented a villa in Rawai, close to the beach, private pool, two bedrooms, palm trees swaying like the island was welcoming me. The moment I stepped out of the airport, the thick tropical air hit me like a warm blanket. It was humid, of course, but it was alive. Johannesburg air always felt tense, like everyone was waiting for something bad to happen. Phuket air felt like it was inviting me to slow down, to breathe, to stop running.

My first months were paradise. I woke early, swam laps in the pool, walked to the beach, ate fresh mango and grilled fish for the price of a cup of coffee back home. In the evenings, I met other expats—retired Germans, British engineers, Australian divorcees living their “second life.” And in that circle, I became known as the guy who “figured it out.” The man who wouldn’t get scammed. The realist. The advisor. “Ask Marcus,” they’d say. “He knows all the tricks.” And maybe I did. I’d studied them like a science. I kept everything transactional. If I wanted company, I paid for it upfront—bar fine, one night, done. No emotions. No attachments. No risks. Life was clean, predictable, controlled, and I felt strangely proud of that. I built a system where nobody could take advantage of me. And I told myself that was happiness.

Then, one Saturday night, the script flipped.

I wasn’t looking for love. I wasn’t looking for anything, really. I was at the Rawai Night Market wandering through food stalls, watching tourists bargain over sarongs they didn’t need, smelling grilled squid and fried chicken and mango steam rising from carts. I stopped at a jewelry stall—not because of the jewelry, but because of the woman. Her name, I would later learn, was Ploy. She was mid-30s, plain clothes, ponytail, no fake lashes, no heavy makeup, no bar-girl theatrics. She wasn’t performing for anyone, just quietly arranging bracelets with a tired focus of someone who has worked too many hours for too little pay. Something about her made me pause. She looked real. Real in a way nothing else in Thailand had looked real in my four months there.

I picked up a bracelet. She looked up. “Three hundred baht,” she said simply. I scoffed, half-joking, half-testing. “Too much. Two hundred.” She didn’t flinch. Didn’t smile fake. Didn’t try to charm me. She just said, “Three hundred,” and went back to arranging bracelets. I bought it for three hundred. Not because I needed it, but because I respected her. Because she didn’t care if I bought it or not. Because she wasn’t selling anything but the bracelet—not a fantasy, not affection, not attention.

The next Saturday, I went back. For the food, I told myself. For the market atmosphere. But I walked by her stall again. She was there, the same shirt, same ponytail, same tired eyes. I picked up another bracelet. She remembered me. “You like bracelets too much,” she teased. And for the first time in a long time, I felt something click open in my chest—not desire, not lust, but curiosity.

Weeks passed, and Saturdays became our rhythm. I’d bring her iced coffee. She started bringing me sticky rice wrapped in banana leaf. We talked little, laughed occasionally, but there was something easy about her presence, something steady, something that didn’t ask anything of me. She told me she worked housekeeping at a resort during the day and sold jewelry at night to support her daughter up north. She never complained. Never asked for help. Never gave me the slightest hint of a sob story.

And that was the first crack in my armor. I waited for the scam. I watched for it. Any mention of a sick child, an emergency, a need for money. But she never asked. Days turned into dinners. Dinners turned into long talks. Long talks turned into nights spent together. And I found myself doing something I never did—I began to care.

But that scared me more than any scam story ever did. So I pulled away. I went back to the bars. I tried to return to my rules. I tried to be Marcus the Cynic again. But every woman felt like an echo of a life I no longer wanted. And every night, I found myself thinking of her—of her tired eyes, her real laugh, her quiet strength.

Then one night, at midnight, she texted me: “Nam sick. Hospital. I’m scared.” My heart froze. This was it. The scam moment. The moment where desperation turns into dollar signs. I waited for the follow-up message asking for money. It never came. Not five minutes later. Not ten. Not ever.

I drove to the hospital anyway.

She was sitting alone on a bench outside the pediatric ward, holding her daughter close. Nam was small, feverish, terrified. And Ploy—her eyes were swollen, her hands shaking, her entire world collapsing in that one silent hallway. She looked up, saw me, and whispered, “You came…” as if she didn’t expect anyone to show up for her.

When the hospital asked for payment, I walked to the counter and paid without thinking. When I told her, she cried—not the manipulative, performative tears I’d learned to expect from scammers, but real tears, raw tears, gratitude that looked like heartbreak. “I will pay you back,” she said. And two weeks later, she did. She came to my villa with an envelope, every baht repaid, counted. I couldn’t speak. Nobody in Thailand had ever done that. None of my expat friends believed it. Not one.

That was the night I realized I wasn’t protecting myself from her—I was protecting myself from the possibility that she might be real.

What followed were months of small moments that meant everything: her cooking porridge in my kitchen, her daughter calling me “Uncle Marcus,” her laughter scattering the darkness from my villa like light. And somewhere between morning coffees and market nights, I felt my walls collapse.

One night, on the terrace, watching geckos chase insects under the warm Phuket lights, I said it: “I love you.” She froze. Her eyes welled up. And she whispered: “I scared, Marcus. Scared you think I am same like bar girl. Scared you go away later. Scared you wake up and see I am not enough.” For the first time in my adult life, I made a promise I wasn’t sure I could keep, but I meant with all my heart: “I’m not going anywhere.”

And I didn’t.

She moved in slowly, gently, as if afraid to take up too much space in my life. She brought her Buddha statue. Her clothes. Her jewelry tools. Then finally, her daughter. Nam went to school in Phuket. She called me “Papa.” And I taught her how to swim, how to ride a bike, how to do math homework. I couldn’t fix my relationship with my own sons, but I could choose to do better with her. And when my youngest messaged me, accusing me of being a father to “some Thai child instead of your real kids,” I didn’t argue. I just said the truth: “I failed you. I’m trying to be better now.”

Life wasn’t perfect. We fought. She sent money to her family; I got upset. I made decisions without her; she shut down. We both had wounds we didn’t know how to articulate. But we learned. We tried. We chose each other again and again. And as months turned into years, I realized something profound: I wasn’t scammed. I was saved. Not by a woman trying to take my money, but by a woman who didn’t want anything from me except honesty and presence—two things I’d denied the world my whole life.

Ploy didn’t con me. She didn’t manipulate me. She didn’t scheme. She simply existed—quiet, hardworking, loving. And in her steady presence, I confronted the biggest scam I’d ever run: the lie that I didn’t need anyone. The lie that safety mattered more than connection. The lie that being alone was strength.

I came to Thailand terrified of losing my money. Instead, I almost lost something far more valuable: my second chance at being human.

Today, as I sit with her on the terrace watching Nam color her homework notebook while the Andaman Sea glows under the sunset, I finally understand something I should’ve learned decades ago: Some walls keep danger out. But some walls keep life out, too.

And the hardest con to escape is the one you run on yourself.

I used to think the hardest part was letting someone in, admitting I cared, dropping my guard long enough to say “I love you” and mean it. I was wrong. That was the easy part. The hard part is everything that comes after—the weight of that promise, the way love doesn’t just sit quietly in your life but rearranges it, demands things from you, forces you to confront the person you’ve been for the last 52 years. Falling in love with Ploy didn’t magically erase who I was. I was still Marcus, still the realist, still the man who measured risk before emotion, who calculated outcomes before choices. The difference now was that every decision I made affected two other people: a Thai woman who’d worked herself to the bone her entire life, and a seven-year-old girl who’d begun calling me “Papa” like it was the most natural thing in the world.

Life settled into something that looked suspiciously like a family. Mornings were no longer just coffee and pool laps—they were school uniforms, missing socks, rushed bowls of rice porridge, and a small voice complaining that she didn’t want to go to school because math was “boring.” Afternoons were no longer quiet swims and reading in the shade; they were grocery runs, parent-teacher meetings, and explaining in broken Thai-English to the school staff that yes, I was involved, even if my Thai sounded like a toddler learning to speak. Nights weren’t just whiskey on the terrace—they were homework help, brushing tiny teeth, turning off cartoons, and tucking in a child who, three years before, hadn’t even existed in my universe. And through all of that, there was Ploy, moving through our days like a quiet center of gravity. She woke before both of us, packed lunches, checked uniforms, called her mother upcountry, sent small amounts of money when she could. She’d spent her whole life carrying everyone else. It took her a long time to understand that she didn’t have to do it alone anymore.

But just because we were building something didn’t mean the world suddenly became kind. On the surface, everything looked perfect. We had our villa, our routine, our laughter. Underneath, there were fault lines—not because of her, not even because of me exactly, but because of the gap between our worlds. Culturally, emotionally, historically. I came from a place where you guarded everything—your money, your heart, your time. She came from a place where you gave everything—to family, to duty, to survival. Those two worlds collided most often over one thing: money. Not the dramatic “she emptied my bank account” kind of story people love to tell, but the quiet friction of priorities. One afternoon, I checked our joint account and noticed 20,000 baht missing. Not stolen, just… gone. When I asked, she told me she had sent it to her brother. No big explanation, just a resigned, “He need help.” For her, it was obvious. For me, it felt like a decision made without me, like being downgraded back to a bank and upgraded from partner to provider. We argued. She shouted in Thai, I answered in English, both of us more emotional than articulate. At one point she said, “You think I use you for money,” not as a question, but as a verdict. It hit me harder than I expected because she was right—some part of me still believed that everyone wanted something from me, and no matter what she did, that part never fully shut up.

That night, after the shouting stopped and the house went quiet, I sat on the terrace alone and thought about how I’d gotten here. I had left Johannesburg to escape crime and chaos, only to create a different kind of chaos inside my chest. I wasn’t being scammed, but I was reacting as if I might be, constantly on alert, constantly analyzing. I realized that I’d studied scams so long I’d started seeing them in every shadow—even where there were none. Ploy wasn’t my ex-wife. She wasn’t some bar girl working the long con. She was a woman raised in a culture where family didn’t stop being your responsibility just because you fell in love. I was a man raised in a culture where protecting your assets meant keeping your hands closed. We weren’t arguing about 20,000 baht. We were arguing about the ghosts of the lives we lived before we met each other.

We talked about it properly the next day, not as adversaries but as two people who, for the first time, admitted how scared they actually were. I told her I was afraid of being used, of being stupid, of waking up at 60 with nothing left because I trusted the wrong person again. She told me she was afraid of being “too Thai” for me—too poor, too uneducated, too obligated to her family, afraid that one day I’d look at her and see only what she lacked instead of what she gave. Somewhere between those fears was the truth: we cared enough about each other to be terrified of losing whatever we’d built. So we made rules. Simple ones. Large expenses over a certain amount—we discuss. Money to family? We talk before sending. Any doubts, any fears—we say them out loud instead of letting them rot in silence. It wasn’t romantic or cinematic. It was… practical. Surprisingly, that made me trust her more, not less.

The universe, of course, doesn’t care how well you structure your relationship. It will test you anyway. My first real test came not from Thailand, not from visas or money or scams, but from my own body. I turned 53 and shrugged it off. “You’re in good shape,” people would say. “You swim, you walk, you don’t smoke. You’re fine.” And I believed it, right up until the morning I woke up with a tightness in my chest that didn’t feel like indigestion. It felt like a fist closing around my lungs. I tried to stand up and the room tilted. Ploy found me half-collapsed next to the bed, my hand on my chest, breath shallow and ragged. Fear has a flavor. I tasted it that morning. Phuket’s private hospitals are efficient in a way that feels almost unreal when you’re used to the bureaucratic chaos of South African healthcare. Within an hour, I had wires on my chest, a cannula in my hand, and a doctor explaining that my heart was not, in fact, invincible. It wasn’t a full heart attack, he said. A “warning event.” A wake-up call. “You need to change some things,” he told me. “Stress, food, lifestyle. You’re not 30 anymore.” No one likes being reminded that they are mortal, especially men like me who built their lives thinking they could out-plan everything.

Ploy stayed by my side the whole time, slipping between Thai and English as she argued with nurses, clarified medication schedules, and asked questions I never thought to ask. I’d always thought of myself as the protector, the one in control, the one who made the decisions. Lying there with tubes in my arms and machines monitoring each beat of my heart, I realized how fragile that illusion was. For the first time in a long time, someone else was protecting me. Not because of my money, not because of what I could give, but because losing me would shatter her world as much as losing her would shatter mine. When the bill came, it was large. I paid it without blinking. Not once did she say, “I will pay you back.” Not once did I think, “Is she using me?” Because in that moment, it wasn’t about money. It was about survival—ours.

Recovery forced me to slow down in ways I didn’t want to. No more heavy fried food every day, no more late nights with whiskey, no more pretending stress didn’t exist. The doctor recommended light exercise, regular check-ups, less alcohol, and “emotional stability,” which made me laugh out loud. Emotional stability? With a Thai partner, two estranged sons, a stepdaughter who called me Papa, and a life built in a country whose language I still couldn’t speak fluently? Sure, doc. Sounds simple. But I tried. I ate better. I drank less. I worried more quietly. Sometimes that’s the best you can do.

My health scare made its way back to Johannesburg through the grapevine. Social media is funny like that—you can move across the world and still not escape the eyes of people you left behind. One evening, I got a message from my eldest son, Daniel. Short. To the point. “Heard you were in the hospital. You okay?” I stared at it for a long time. When was the last time we had a real conversation? Years. I wanted to reply with sarcasm. “Oh, so now you care?” But I didn’t. Instead, I wrote: “I had a small heart incident, but I’m okay now. I’m in Thailand. I live here now. I’m with someone.” He saw the message, but he didn’t respond. Not at first.

A week later, he did. “I might come to Thailand for work in a few months,” he wrote. “Maybe we can meet.” My first reaction was suspicion. Was this guilt? Obligation? Curiosity? Did it matter? Underneath all of that was a quieter voice, one I’d learned to ignore: hope. Ploy found me staring at my phone and asked what was wrong. When I told her, she smiled in that small, cautious way she does when she’s happy but scared to show it too much. “Good,” she said. “He should see you. See your life. See you try.” She didn’t say what we were both thinking: that he might come, meet us, judge her, judge Nam, judge our life. That he might see everything as a betrayal instead of a second chance. She didn’t say any of that. She just said, “We prepare.”

When Daniel finally came, it was during rainy season. The sky was gray, the sea choppy, Phuket a little less postcard-perfect and a little more real. He arrived at our villa with a small suitcase and a guarded expression that looked painfully like my own reflected back at me. We shook hands instead of hugging. It felt strangely formal, like we were business associates rather than father and son. Ploy greeted him politely in English. Nam peeked from behind her, then hid when he smiled at her. I watched him take in the house, the pool, the décor, the evidence of a life he had not been invited into: small shoes by the door, a school backpack on the chair, a Thai-English dictionary open on the table.

We made polite conversation that first evening. His work. My health. South Africa. Thailand. He asked cautious questions about how long I’d been here, what I did, how my visa worked. The son of a man who had always prioritized stability over feelings wanted to know logistics first. It made sense. That was what I’d taught him, whether I wanted to admit it or not. It wasn’t until the second day that the emotions began to surface. We were sitting on the terrace after dinner. Ploy was inside washing dishes, Nam watching cartoons half in Thai, half in English. The air was heavy with humidity and unspoken words.

“So,” he said finally, “you replaced us with them.” It wasn’t shouted. It wasn’t even said with overt anger. Just tired resignation, and something that sounded like a wound that had never healed. “No,” I answered, but my voice cracked. “I failed you long before I ever met them.” He snorted, a bitter little sound. “Nice line.” I took a deep breath. I could have deflected. I could have gotten defensive. I could have reminded him of his mother’s narrative. Instead, I chose something I had rarely chosen in my life: honesty without defense. “I was a terrible father,” I said. “I thought providing money was enough. I thought making sure you had a house and school and safety was love. It wasn’t. Or it wasn’t all of it. I didn’t show up emotionally. I hid in work. I hid behind stress. I let your mother carry the emotional load while I carried the financial one and thought that was fair. When she left, I hid even more. You learned that I wasn’t there. You weren’t wrong.”

He was quiet for a long time. The sound of the ceiling fan and crickets filled the gap. Finally, he asked, “And what changed?” I looked inside, where Ploy was laughing at something Nam said in a mix of Thai and mispronounced English. “I met someone who didn’t want my money,” I said. “She wanted my presence. My time. My attention. And when you have someone who asks for those things without manipulating you, without guilting you, you start realizing how much you’ve withheld from everyone else.” He shifted in his chair, uncomfortable. “So, what am I supposed to do with that?” I shook my head. “You’re not supposed to do anything. I’m not telling you this to earn forgiveness. I’m telling you because you deserve the truth. You grew up thinking you weren’t enough to make your father show up. But it was never about you. It was about me. My fear. My selfishness. My walls. You weren’t the problem. I was.”

That conversation didn’t fix everything. Life isn’t a movie. There was no dramatic hug, no sudden healing. But it cracked something open. He stayed for a week. He watched how I treated Ploy. How I walked Nam to school. How I navigated a foreign country with a partner who came from a different world. He saw my vulnerability in the small details—the medication on my bedside table, the way I rubbed my chest when I was tired, the way I apologized when I snapped and tried to do better. Before he left, he said, almost awkwardly, “She seems… good for you. And you… seem different.” I smiled. “I’m trying to be.” He nodded. “Maybe that’s enough. For now.” It wasn’t an absolution. But it was a start.

Time moved the way it always does: faster than you think. Nam grew taller, more confident, more fluent in English than both her parents combined. Ploy’s jewelry stall became an online shop. I helped her set up a website, taught her the basics of e-commerce, watched with quiet pride as she received orders from tourists long after they had flown home. Our life evolved from survival into something that resembled stability. The kind of stability I’d thought I could only buy with money. The kind I’d spent my whole life chasing in all the wrong places.

And yet, even in that stability, the echoes of who I had been still showed up. There were days I caught myself calculating—not numbers, but risks. What if I died suddenly? What if my assets were frozen? What if she was left with nothing because I hadn’t done the paperwork right? So I did what I knew best: I prepared. I met with lawyers in both South Africa and Thailand. I restructured my will. I set up a trust that would support Ploy and Nam without giving anyone control they weren’t ready for. I made sure that if anything happened to me, they would not be left at zero. I did it not out of distrust, but out of love. It was the most honest thing I’d ever done with my money.

One evening, when all the documents were finally signed, I sat Ploy down and explained everything. Where the money was, how it would reach her, who to call, what to do if I wasn’t there. She listened silently, her face serious. When I finished, she didn’t look relieved the way I’d expected. She looked… sad. “Why you tell me this now?” she asked softly. “Because I want you to be safe,” I said. “Because I’m not young anymore. Because I don’t want you to depend on luck if something happens.” She shook her head. “I don’t stay with you for money, Marcus.” There was pain in her voice, like I’d reopened an old wound. “I know,” I said quickly. “I know that. This isn’t about that. This is about me finally understanding that if I love someone, I have to protect them in every way I can. Even from my own mortality.”

She was quiet for a long time. Then she moved closer, sat beside me, and leaned her head on my shoulder. “You protect too much,” she murmured. “Even from love.” I smiled sadly. “I’m learning,” I said. “Slowly.” She laughed, that small breathy laugh that always makes my chest feel lighter. “Good. We have time. Not forever. But enough.”

Marcus’ story doesn’t end with a dramatic twist. There is no betrayal, no hidden scam, no sudden collapse. And that, in itself, is the twist, isn’t it? For men like him—for men like so many of you watching—this is the unexpected ending: not losing everything to a woman who played you, but realizing that the person you were most afraid of was yourself. The part of you that believed you were safer alone. The part of you that mistook control for peace. The part of you that thought knowing all the red flags meant you were ready for real life, when all it meant was that you were prepared for the worst and had no idea what to do when something good walked in.

Marcus didn’t get scammed by Thailand. He didn’t get scammed by Ploy. He got scammed by his own fear for most of his life—the fear that if he opened up, if he cared deeply, if he admitted he needed people, he would be destroyed. But love doesn’t destroy you. It exposes you. It shows you every part of yourself you’ve been hiding. It holds up a mirror and asks, “Is this really who you want to be?” And you either run, or you stay and do the work. He stayed. That’s the difference.

If you’re listening to this thinking, “I’ll never let that happen to me. I’ll never get played,” ask yourself: are you protecting your wallet, or are you imprisoning your heart? Are you avoiding scams, or are you avoiding life? Are you so busy watching for red flags that you don’t even notice when someone shows up with no flags at all, just a tired smile, a real laugh, and a quiet willingness to stand next to you in a hospital at 3AM?

The lesson in Marcus’ story isn’t “trust everyone.” It’s not “Thai women are all saints” or “love conquers everything.” Life is more complicated than that. There are scams. There are users. There are people who will smile at you and slowly bleed you dry if you let them. But there are also people who won’t. People who bring you sticky rice instead of sob stories. People who pay you back when they don’t have to. People who are scared of being used just as much as you are. The hardest thing in the world is learning how to tell the difference without walling yourself off from both.

Marcus thought he’d mastered the game. He knew all the angles, all the tricks, all the exits. He built a life where nobody could hurt him. And then one woman with a jewelry stall at a night market and a little girl with feverish eyes walked into his story and changed the rules. Not by tricking him, not by seducing his wallet, but by asking him for something he never thought he’d give freely again: himself.

So if you’re out there right now, living in that gray zone between caution and isolation, ask yourself: are you safe, or are you just alone? Only you can answer that. Just make sure that in protecting yourself from the worst, you don’t accidentally shut out the best thing that might ever happen to you.