The past six months

The past six months are the measure Tessa gives to a turbulent stretch of her life, not a settled account of a relationship whose meaning she can confidently explain. She remembers repeated hurt, a bet, fights, and betrayals, yet also a happiness she cannot dismiss. By the time she considers whether she would undo the period, its damage and its attachment to Hardin have become impossible to separate.

A relationship measured in repetition

At a restaurant, amid an alcohol haze and the awkwardness of dinner, Tessa slips outside into the night. The restaurant stands among woods, whose darkness and seclusion might ordinarily feel inviting; to her, already feeling trapped, the setting intensifies her desire to get away. She imagines leaving, packing for Seattle, and staying in a hotel until she finds an apartment. Hardin is inside, openly flirting with another woman, while Tessa struggles to make sense of the humiliation.

She tells Robert that she has been playing these games with Hardin for six months. The duration matters because the scene is not, in her account, an isolated lapse. She is sick of Hardin doing this to her and believes he knows how deeply it hurts: he has previously acknowledged that he does such things because he knows they will affect her. Her distress is therefore tied both to the act itself and to her sense that the pain is intentional. Even as she apologizes for confiding in Robert, she recognizes how long the pattern has continued without teaching her to leave it.

Love and deliberate injury

In a later reflection, Tessa tries to reconcile Hardin’s latest cruelty with what she believes about his feelings. She understands him to have said that he does not love her and pursues her only to sleep with her. She doubts that he means it, because she believes he loves her and has shown that love repeatedly during the same six months. But that conviction does not cancel what she also knows: he has repeatedly hurt her, making her feel weak when his ego is bruised. In her reckoning, love cannot excuse the deliberate injury.

The problem is not simply that Tessa cannot tell whether Hardin’s words are true. She describes truth and lies as shifting with his moods, leaving her unable to rely on the certainty she once held onto through fights and damage to their apartment. She wonders whether he really sees her as a toy, then recognizes that his confidence when he spoke has made the question harder to dismiss. The six-month span thus records not a resolution but an erosion of certainty: she still believes in his love, while asking whether that belief can sustain a relationship in which he knowingly harms her.

Breakup, departure, and the question of beginning again

After another breakup, Tessa tells Hardin that she wants to start over and forget everything that has happened in the last six months. From Hardin’s perspective, her wish to forget is painful in its own right: he agrees outwardly, but does not want her to want to forget him. The exchange exposes a difference within their separation. Tessa names the past as a burden she wants to escape; Hardin fears that escape would mean erasing him as well.

Tessa later identifies this as their second actual breakup, despite feeling that there have been many more. This time, she has not rushed back at the first sign of affection. She has left the house and Hardin’s gifts, and plans to leave for Seattle in less than twenty-four hours. Even so, when she recalls being frightened and out of it, she tells Hardin she knows she would have called only for him. Her attachment persists, but her actions distinguish this separation from the earlier returns she remembers: she cannot accept his offered embrace, and leaving is now an immediate, concrete plan.

What Tessa will not erase

Noah asks whether Tessa would truly undo the last six months. At first she says yes, thinking of the bet, her endless fights with Hardin, the deterioration of her relationship with her mother, Steph’s betrayal, and the humiliation. Her answer gathers the period’s harms across different parts of her life, rather than reducing it to the couple’s conflict alone.

Then she remembers Hardin’s hand on hers, his tattooed arms pulling her close, and the rare occasions when his laughter filled the apartment and made her feel more alive than ever. She changes her answer: she would not erase the period, and repeats that decision firmly when Noah asks if she is sure. The reversal does not make the bet, fights, or betrayals acceptable; it shows that those events coexist in memory with experiences she values. Her final qualification is that she would have done some things differently with Noah. The six months end, in this reflection, not as a simple lesson or a clean rejection of the past, but as a history Tessa would keep while recognizing that parts of it—and her choices within it—could have been different.