Landon confronts Tessa about her relationship with Hardin

Landon confronts Tessa about the damage her turbulent relationship with Hardin is causing beyond the two of them. His reality check turns a private cycle of conflict and reconciliation into a family problem: with his mother pregnant, his family trying to come together, and New York looming as a possible fresh start, Landon tells Tessa that their fighting cannot simply be carried from one city to another.

The Conflict Reaches Landon’s Family

The confrontation follows a scene in which Hardin puts his hands on Landon and slams him against a wall. Tessa had told Hardin about her plan to go to New York with Landon, and she had thought Hardin handled the news well. Landon’s account corrects that impression. Even if Hardin eventually let him go, Landon insists, the incident is part of an increasingly serious problem, not a harmless flare-up.

Landon connects the immediate altercation to the wider pattern. Tessa and Hardin, he says, keep traveling between Seattle and Landon’s home, fighting wherever they go. Their instability is no longer contained within their romance: the latest scene could have harmed Landon’s pregnant mother by upsetting her. The pregnancy makes the effects of the couple’s conflict newly concrete, while Landon’s concern makes clear that other family members are being asked to absorb its consequences.

Landon’s Reality Check

Landon’s criticism wounds Tessa partly because it comes from the friend she has counted on to support her. She explains that going to New York without Hardin was meant to give her room to figure herself out. Landon doubts that the separation will hold: he believes Hardin will either follow her or that she will remain where she is, caught in another round of fighting. Tessa has heard versions of these objections before, and recognizes that she has made similar arguments herself, but hearing them from Landon gives them a sharper force.

She apologizes for drawing him into the turmoil and says she never wanted him to feel that their problems were his to carry. Landon answers that he does feel affected, as do other people. He also places the dispute within the pressures facing his family: his mother’s pregnancy, Ken’s efforts to repair his relationship with Hardin, and Landon’s own impending move. He says that the family needs to come together and that Tessa is not helping it do so.

That judgment strikes at Tessa’s sense of belonging. She has regarded Landon’s friendship as a safe place among people who otherwise seem to be slipping away from her. Now she fears that she is unwanted in the family she had hoped to join. Landon softens his delivery enough to apologize for being harsh, but does not withdraw the substance of what he has said. His honesty costs them a moment of ease, yet makes the consequences of the couple’s behavior harder for Tessa to dismiss.

New York and the Meaning of a Fresh Start

Tessa asks whether Landon no longer wants her to go to New York with him. He distinguishes his objection from a simple rejection: he had imagined New York as a fresh start for both of them, not another place where Tessa and Hardin would fight. The distinction leaves the future of the plan uncertain. New York had offered Tessa the possibility of distance from Hardin and a life organized around her own decisions; Landon’s warning exposes the risk that a change of location alone will not break their established pattern.

The exchange does not end with a settled move or a reconciled relationship. Instead, Tessa acknowledges why Landon is upset and begins to recognize how much she wants to leave. She has no firm plan, little money, and no acceptance letter from NYU. Until the confrontation, she had not fully understood how ready she was to try something different anyway. Landon’s criticism therefore has a double effect: it makes her feel excluded from his family, while clarifying that she needs to attempt a life on her own terms.

Significance Within the Relationship’s Pattern

The argument gains weight from the novel’s earlier distinction between an unhealthy relationship and an abusive one. Tessa raises the question of abusive relationships with Hardin, then clarifies that she means the ways they deliberately hurt each other, not an accusation that he has physically abused her. Hardin denies ever laying a hand on her. That denial sits uneasily beside an earlier episode in which he holds Tessa’s wrists behind her back while she tries to get away. The contrast complicates the couple’s own language for harm: declarations of love and trust do not erase the physical restraint and recurring conflict shown elsewhere in their relationship.

Landon does not resolve that argument by assigning the relationship a definitive label. His intervention instead shifts attention to its effects: the repeated fights, the people drawn into them, and Tessa’s uncertain ability to separate from Hardin. The confrontation marks a change in perspective rather than a clean break. For Tessa, the friend who once represented refuge now voices the cost of the cycle; for the plot, New York becomes not a guaranteed escape but a test of whether she can begin choosing independence without relying on a fresh setting to do the work for her.