Addiction and recovery

Addiction and recovery in the novel are not a single story of descent followed by a clean return to health. Richard Young dies after injecting heroin; Hardin Scott repeatedly uses alcohol, marijuana, and pills to blunt pain; and Ken Scott’s years of sobriety and therapy are described as hard-won change. These parallel accounts connect substance use to grief, family history, and the damage people inflict on themselves and others, while making clear that recovery can be partial, pressured, and vulnerable to reversal.

Substance Use as Self-Destruction

Hardin Scott’s drinking is established early as part of his response to emotional distress. In a bar, he orders a Jack and Coke, then changes the order to a double. His bitter thought that he could have shared a father-son drink with Christian Vance gives the moment an additional charge: alcohol is both an immediate means of numbing himself and a reminder of the uncertain family ties pressing on him. The scene offers no account of a sustained attempt to stop. Instead, the drink arrives as an ordinary, almost reflexive answer to pain.

Hardin later describes a broader pattern in which hurting others is followed by hurting himself before they can retaliate. That self-description helps place substance use within a larger cycle of anticipated rejection, anger, and self-punishment, without reducing every harmful act to addiction. When Tessa leaves, the cycle sharpens. Hardin threatens that he will not be able to stay sober if sobriety means enduring the hollow pain of her absence. He reports restlessness, nausea, exhaustion, and impatience, while his surroundings remain organized around drinking and drug use. His language makes abstinence feel, to him, not like relief but like exposure to pain he cannot yet manage.

Richard Young’s Death and Tessa’s Recognition

Richard’s addiction is presented through the physical facts Tessa learns after finding him on the bathroom floor. Paramedics and police confirm that he has died after injecting heroin; bags of heroin in his jeans indicate that he had brought the drug with him. He had been alone in the apartment and dead for hours before Tessa found him. The official confirmation does not make the death comprehensible to her. It fixes the fact of the loss while leaving her caught in the image of his pale face and in the apartment she associates with the catastrophe.

The discovery itself becomes part of Tessa’s traumatic memory. She recalls shaking her father, hearing the needle fall from his arm, and feeling a possible movement in his hand before checking for a pulse and finding none. The small clinking sound persists in her mind alongside the uncertainty of whether the movement was real or an imagined last hope. The scene shows how the consequences of addiction extend beyond the person using drugs: Tessa must carry both the death and the sensory details of discovering it.

At Richard’s funeral, Tessa also revises the account she had been able to sustain about him. She remembers that he left when she was a child and returned only months before his death, by chance. She had accepted his alcoholism more readily than his drug use, and recognizes that she had been trying to make him better in her own mind. Her disappointment is not a claim that his life contained no good; she acknowledges that she did not know him well enough to judge him fully. Rather, the funeral confronts her with the distance between the father she hoped to recover and the man whose choices included addiction and abandonment.

Hardin’s Relapse and the Limits of Numbing

After Richard’s death and Tessa’s departure, Hardin is shown drinking and smoking again. Two days into this period, he complains that the situation is already becoming difficult to endure. He also has pain pills, which he initially imagines might intensify the effect of the drugs available to him. Instead, they make him tired, and the prospect of sleep brings nightmares involving Tessa. His use therefore fails on its own terms: it dulls him without giving him reliable escape from grief or memory.

The pills also appear in a setting of indifference to their risks. Hardin hands over the bottle rather than treating it as a means of his own recovery, and he says he does not care what happens to the person taking them. His response reflects more than a substance-use problem; it shows how thoroughly despair has narrowed his concern for himself and others. Even the practical details surrounding him suggest neglect: he has changed his clothes only once in nearly a week, and his jeans bear patches sewn over holes. The passage does not present these details as proof that he is recovering or seeking help. They instead make visible the disorder accompanying his renewed use.

Sobriety, Therapy, and Uneven Change

Ken Scott’s recovery provides a contrast to Hardin’s immediate return to substances. Karen tells Tessa that Ken has had years of sobriety and therapy, alongside reflection and remorse. She does not use that history to excuse his mistakes. Her account instead separates accountability from change: Ken can have caused lasting hurt and still have become different from the man he once was. His regret over his relationship with Hardin remains part of the family story, but his sobriety and therapy are described as sustained efforts rather than an instant transformation.

Hardin’s later account of drinking is less categorical. When Tessa asks whether he still abstains, he says that he drinks a little, usually wine or light beer, but will not again drink a bottle of vodka in one sitting. The distinction matters: this is not a claim of continued total abstinence. It indicates a limit he says he has set around his drinking, while leaving the durability and circumstances of that limit open. The novel thus places Ken’s reported years of sobriety beside Hardin’s stated moderation, rather than treating the two as interchangeable forms of recovery.

Hardin also attends weekly sessions with a mental-health professional, although his self-mocking account focuses on how much he talks about Tessa and how the conversations make him feel better. The sessions suggest an effort to find a place for what is happening inside his head, but they are not presented as a simple cure for substance use. Later, he tells Tessa that he has seen doctors and made changes to his exercise habits. Along with his refusal to return to heavy vodka drinking, these details show movement, but not a definitive end to vulnerability.

Recovery Within Relationships

The novel links recovery to relationships without making love a substitute for treatment or accountability. Hardin’s fear that sobriety will leave him alone with unbearable pain shows how easily emotional dependence can become a justification for self-destruction. His belief that he needs Tessa is intense, but the story also shows that his need does not undo the harm caused by his choices. Likewise, Tessa’s love for Richard does not make her responsible for his addiction, and her recognition of her idealized hopes does not erase the affection she felt for him.

Across Richard, Hardin, and Ken, recovery therefore has different visible forms and consequences. Richard’s drug use culminates in death and in a traumatic discovery for his daughter. Hardin’s substance use returns under the pressure of separation, while his later statements describe boundaries and efforts to change without establishing permanent sobriety. Ken’s history, as Karen recounts it, offers evidence of longer-term sobriety and reflection, but not absolution. Together, these distinctions resist a neat progression from addiction to cure: change is measured through specific conduct and sustained effort, while grief, regret, and the possibility of renewed harm remain part of the account.