Richard Young

Richard Young is Tessa’s father, whose death after injecting heroin transforms her already painful separation from him into a lasting trauma. Found alone on the floor of Hardin Scott’s apartment, he is at once the man Tessa had hoped to protect and a person whose struggle with addiction continued beyond the reach of those trying to help him. The brief recollections that follow his death give him a character beyond the circumstances of his final hours: Hardin remembers a difficult, sometimes irritating man who loved Tessa and retained optimism despite a life marked by hardship.

Identity and Final Discovery

Tessa discovers Richard’s body on the bathroom floor of Hardin’s apartment. At first, her fear is that the motionless figure might be the man who left her; when she can focus, she recognizes her father instead. A needle is still in his arm, and his face has lost its color. The discovery fulfills one of Tessa’s nightmares even as it spares her the other: the person lying dead is not the absent man she had feared losing in that moment, but her father.

The shock leaves Tessa fixed on the scene and unable to move on from it. Paramedics and police officers eventually establish what she already understood from seeing and touching him: Richard is dead. Their confirmation makes the death official, but does not make it comprehensible to her. The physical fact of his body becomes an image that persists in her mind, his pale face seeming more like a mask than a human face.

Addiction and Death

The authorities determine that Richard died after pushing a needle into his vein. Bags of heroin are found in the pocket of his jeans, and the account associates them with his plans for the weekend. He was alone in the apartment when he died and had been dead for hours by the time Tessa came upon him. The account establishes the immediate circumstances of his death without resolving every question about his intentions or the full course of his addiction.

Richard had left a program before his death. Ken had been trying to learn what happened and why he was not informed when Richard left the facility; he says that he had given strict instructions, and money, to ensure he would be contacted if anything went wrong. The failure to notify Ken exposes a gap between the effort to keep Richard connected to support and the reality of his departure. By the time his family understands that he is gone, that effort can no longer reach him.

Tessa’s Loss and Guilt

Tessa turns the circumstances of Richard’s death into an accusation against herself. She wants Ken and Landon to stop blaming themselves for her father’s choices, yet assigns responsibility to herself instead. She thinks she should not have gone to London and should have remained nearby to watch over Richard. Her absence feels especially painful because she was across the world dealing with another loss while he faced his own demons alone.

That self-blame persists alongside the stark evidence that Richard was alone for hours and that the people trying to track his situation were not told when he left the facility. Tessa’s wish that she had been there is an expression of grief, not proof that she could have prevented his death. Her attention returns instead to the imagined alternative: if she had not crossed the threshold of the apartment, she believes she would still have everything. In that thought, the apartment becomes inseparable from the moment she found him and from the losses she connects to her earlier life.

Relationships and Character

Hardin’s recollection offers a view of Richard from outside Tessa’s grief. He had not known Richard for long and had barely tolerated him, but admits to liking him. Richard was obnoxious, and Hardin resented the way he emptied box after box of cereal. Yet those everyday irritations sit beside Hardin’s respect for the way Richard loved Tessa and for his optimistic outlook, which persisted even though his own life was difficult.

Hardin’s response is complicated by other losses and fears. Richard’s death makes him think not only of a man he barely knew, but also of the father he believed he had in Ken, of Tessa, and of the possibility that she may be lost to him. He is surprised by the weight of his grief: Richard’s death first seems to him like an event affecting a person who had wasted his life, then becomes a heavy absence. That shift reflects the personal connections Richard had formed, however imperfectly, with both Tessa and Hardin.

Narrative Significance

Richard’s death changes the meaning of the apartment for Tessa. Bookshelves and a brick wall had given the place the appearance of an ordinary, even attractive interior, but after the discovery she sees those details as a covering over a cursed space. Her judgment binds the apartment to the chain of losses and pain she believes began when she entered it. The setting therefore becomes part of her traumatic memory rather than a neutral backdrop to her father’s death.

Richard is represented through both the violent finality of his death and the conflicting recollections of those left behind. Tessa remembers the father she could not save and imagines that being present might have changed the outcome. Hardin remembers the man’s flaws, his cereal-box habit, his love for Tessa, and his capacity for hope. Together, these perspectives resist reducing Richard either to his addiction or to an idealized lost parent: his death is devastating, while the surviving impressions of him remain mixed, affectionate, and unresolved.