London is presented through Hardin Scott’s experience of separation rather than as a scenic backdrop: its clinic, his cast, and the memories he cannot keep at bay make the city a setting for both physical vulnerability and emotional reckoning. The London episodes connect the pages he wrote after leaving to the later uncertainty that makes him reach urgently for news of Tessa.

Separation and the Written Pages

Tessa reads a passage Hardin wrote on the sixth day after leaving. In it, he blames himself for treating her cruelly, yelling when she challenged him, and repeatedly lying; he recognizes that he had relied on her forgiveness. The account ends with him smashing his phone under his boot. Tessa supposes that he wrote it soon after his previous return from London, but also believes he has since changed his mind and wants nothing to do with her. The city therefore enters her reading as a marker of distance and of a past version of Hardin whose remorse she can encounter only through his pages.

The Clinic and the Cast

During his time in London, Hardin is examined at a busy clinic and told that his hand is broken. The doctor says he will need a cast for several weeks and offers a prescription for pain; Hardin dismisses the idea that medication could touch the deeper pain he feels. An hour later, his hand and wrist are enclosed in thick plaster. The cast turns ordinary tasks into immediate uncertainties: he wonders whether he will be able to drive or write. Rather than resume writing, he insists that it has gone on long enough, since sobriety keeps bringing thoughts and memories to the surface when he is distracted.

Distance and Renewed Alarm

London also holds Hardin in a precarious interval of contact with others. When Landon’s name appears on his phone, Hardin initially ignores the call and pushes the phone back into his jeans. Later, after a call ends with an unexplained warning that he must get through something, he calls Landon back, leaves a crowded area for privacy, and heads toward the rental car he has kept. His thoughts immediately turn to the worst possibility; he presses Landon to tell him whether Tessa is all right. The shift from refusing contact to urgently seeking it echoes the conflict already present in the written pages: distance does not quiet Hardin’s attachment, and uncertainty about Tessa rapidly overwhelms his attempt to hold himself apart.