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There was something about her, a fragile sense of blind conviction. I knew that she would trust me.
At the end of Chapter 2, early in Lucy’s freshman year at Baird, Stephen makes eye contact with her at the party where he sees her for the first time. His realization that he will be able to make Lucy trust him reveals Stephen’s awareness of the importance of trust in relationships. Throughout the book, Stephen uses his charm to convince women to trust him, despite his many infidelities and often callous behavior. While at this point in their relationship Diana no longer trusts him, Lucy falls for him completely, just as he predicts when he first sees her. However, unlike the mutual trust that underpins a strong relationship, the trust in Lucy and Stephen’s relationship goes only one way—from Lucy to Stephen. Stephen’s refusal to make himself vulnerable shows that he never trusts Lucy, only his own ability to command her attention, making their relationship essentially one-sided.
I want you to stop. If I have any hope of trusting you again, I need to know that you’ll stop.
In Chapter 12, Diana confronts Stephen after Keaton Banks sees him kissing Lucy on the day he and Lucy have sex for the first time. Although he and Diana are technically taking a break from dating exclusively, they still occasionally sleep together. Diana sees this time as necessary to rebuild the trust that was broken between them when she learned that he had slept with Nicole Hart. This quotation exemplifies her insistence throughout their relationship that Stephen needs to regain her trust, an example of the theme of the importance of trust in relationships. While Diana is drawn to Stephen and, like Lucy, maintains a long and tumultuous relationship with him, Diana, unlike Lucy, never truly trusts Stephen. Ultimately, Diana breaks up with Stephen when she finds a man she does trust, showing that she understands that she cannot have a strong relationship without trust.
You can’t have a relationship without trust. It’s impossible.
When CJ arrives to take care of Lucy after her breakup with Stephen, she tells Lucy that trust is the most important thing in a relationship, an example of the book’s theme of the importance of trust. This scene is a turning point in Lucy’s relationship with her mother, whom she has distrusted throughout the book, ever since seeing CJ having sex with Gabe. Lucy believes that CJ’s affair with Gabe shattered the trust that should be at the center of a marriage and imagines CJ as a callous betrayer of her husband. However, in this scene, Lucy learns that CJ does value trust and that she has repaired the broken faith between her and Lucy’s father years earlier. This quotation illustrates that trust is the difference between a relationship that can survive infidelity and one, like Stephen and Lucy’s, that cannot.
