A week ago, we enjoyed a false spring here in the Midwest—sunny days and temps in the low sixties—but I knew it was only an illusion. I knew winter would return with a slap to the face. The snow came a couple of days ago, and the wind, and the frigid temperatures. Such is life.

Our flirtation with spring seems now like a cruel trick played by Mother Nature. Imagine what the flock of robins we saw yesterday huddled together in the snow and the cold must think. The birds respond to instinct. If sustained warmer temperatures tell them spring has arrived, they believe it. We believe as well that our lives are moving in a particular direction only to encounter something that turns what we expect on its ear.

Today, Cathy and I drove to a jewelry store in a mall to have the diamonds in her wedding rings checked, as she does twice a year to keep her warranty active. I go along and have my wedding band cleaned. The store was supposed to open at noon, and we arrived about twenty minutes early. We wandered through a J.C. Penney store that was open and then found a seat in front of the jewelry store to wait a few minutes for its opening.

Noon came and went, and the roll-down security gate in front of the jewelry store—the gate that resembles chain link—didn’t rise. We could see a woman in the dark store, so Cathy approached the gate and caught her attention. The woman saw the folder of paperwork in Cathy’s hand and knew she was there to have her rings inspected. She said, “Hand them to me, and I’ll take care of it for you.”

We passed our rings through the gate, and the woman disappeared into the darker reaches of the store. As Cathy and I waited, it suddenly hit me we’d just handed over our rings to a woman who was behind a locked gate. “I guess we just have to trust her,” I said to Cathy, and we laughed. It wasn’t that we really thought the woman would steal the rings, but there was a moment when we were painfully aware of what could have been our barn-sized stupidity.

Which leads me to this week’s writing prompt. Maybe you have a story of your own of a time when you trusted someone only to get stung because of that trust. Maybe you admitted something in confidence to a friend and that friend betrayed you by making it known to the public. Maybe you handed something to someone, on loan, perhaps, and never got that something back. Maybe you never returned something a friend had loaned to you. If you’re a fiction writer, put a character into a similar situation. The key is to let that character’s trust lead to a complication, one that requires the character’s further action. Look for the moment that’s going to change that character’s life forever.

Trust is an interesting element in a narrative when its betrayal creates a moment when people realize their lives are going to be different than the ones they thought they were living.