Samantha

Samantha is a former intern at Vance Publishing whose relationship with Zed and sexual encounter with Hardin surface in arguments long after the events themselves. Though she never appears directly in the supplied scenes, her story exposes the history beneath Hardin and Zed’s hostility: Hardin knowingly slept with a woman Zed was dating, and later uses that encounter to wound him. Samantha is thus both a person in their shared past and a subject whose experience is repeatedly claimed, minimized, or retold by others.

Identity and Limited Presence

Hardin identifies Samantha as a girl who had an internship at Vance Publishing. He says he slept with her while she was dating Zed. The available account gives no independent description of her personality, appearance, family, or later life, and it does not show her speaking directly. What can be established about her is consequently narrow but consequential: she was involved with Zed, had a sexual encounter with Hardin during that relationship, and left a written record of at least one intimate experience.

The limits of that record matter. Samantha enters the narrative through other people’s memories and arguments, not through a scene organized around her own perspective. Hardin refers to a little diary in which she wrote about the night they had sex, but the reader is not given the diary itself or her account of what happened. Her presence is therefore mediated: the men remember her, but their memories serve their current conflict more directly than they reveal her inner life.

The Affair and Its Motive

Hardin recalls that he had known Zed for only a few weeks when he heard Tessa mention Zed in the copy room at Vance Publishing. He says he knew Zed and Samantha were dating and found the situation intriguing; at the time, he thought sleeping with her would be a way to provoke Zed. This recollection makes the affair more than an episode of infidelity. In Hardin’s telling, Samantha’s relationship becomes the means by which he can interfere with a new acquaintance, turning her into the target of a deliberate act of rivalry.

Hardin later describes the encounter as forgettable and claims that Samantha’s diary showed how new the experience was for her. He also makes a degrading remark about her and links her subsequent mention of pregnancy to the encounter. Those statements are part of his taunting account, not an independently confirmed description of Samantha’s motives or circumstances. His contemptuous retelling is designed to hurt Zed, and its cruelty lies partly in the way he treats Samantha’s private writing and possible pregnancy as ammunition. The evidence does not establish what Samantha herself thought of Hardin, the relationship, or the aftermath.

Samantha in Hardin and Zed’s Conflict

Samantha’s name becomes the pivot of a confrontation between Hardin and Zed. Hardin recognizes that the dispute concerns her and accuses Zed of pursuing Tessa because of what happened with Samantha. Zed rejects that explanation, insists Samantha was not what Hardin calls her, and says he cared about Tessa just as he had cared about Samantha. He blames Hardin for ruining both attachments. His defense does not erase his attempt to draw a parallel between the two women, but it sharply contradicts Hardin’s effort to reduce Samantha to an easy conquest.

Later, Zed needles Hardin by comparing the pain of discovering Hardin had slept with Samantha to Hardin’s jealousy in the present. Hardin responds by deliberately recalling the encounter in humiliating detail, including Samantha’s diary and his claim that he can barely remember the night. His words reveal less about Samantha than about the use he makes of her history: he understands that Zed was emotionally invested and chooses details calculated to make that attachment seem ridiculous. Samantha’s past becomes a contest over who can define the injury and whose desire deserves recognition.

Tessa, who has heard Zed name Samantha but cannot initially place the name, asks Hardin about her during the quiet taxi ride after they leave her mother’s house. Hardin has anticipated the question and considers whether to lie, but decides to tell Tessa that Samantha had interned at Vance Publishing and that he slept with her while she was dating Zed. Tessa flinches at his blunt delivery; Hardin apologizes and says he wants to be honest. The exchange makes Samantha’s history newly relevant to Tessa, while also distinguishing disclosure from repair: Hardin tells the truth, but his earlier boasting has already shown how readily he turns the same truth into a weapon.

Narrative Significance and the Limits of Her Story

Samantha’s story is presented through competing acts of narration. Hardin casts the encounter as casual and uses it to assert power over Zed; Zed remembers Samantha as someone he cared about and treats Hardin’s interference as a lasting injury. Tessa’s question interrupts their contest long enough to demand a direct account, but even then Samantha herself remains absent. The reader must distinguish what the characters claim from what the narrative confirms: the affair and the fact that Samantha was dating Zed are stated, while the meanings Hardin assigns to her diary and later pregnancy remark remain his hostile interpretation.

That distinction resonates with the novel’s later argument over how to name harm in Hardin and Tessa’s relationship. Hardin describes their sex as consensual and grounded in trust, while Tessa raises the possibility that both of them deliberately hurt one another. He rejects the label of abuse and insists that an unhealthy relationship is not the same as an abusive one. Elsewhere, during an argument, he pulls Tessa onto his lap and holds her wrists behind her back as she tries to get away. These scenes concern Tessa, not Samantha, and do not establish anything about Samantha’s experience; they do, however, make the novel’s differing claims about intimacy, power, and harm especially visible. Against that wider context, Hardin’s account of Samantha is not a neutral recollection: it is an instance of intimacy narrated by someone who repeatedly uses sexual history to control how others understand a relationship.

Samantha’s significance therefore rests partly in what the story withholds. She is consequential to Zed’s sense of betrayal and to Hardin’s history of provoking him, and her diary suggests she recorded the encounter in her own words. Yet those words are never made available. The gap between Samantha’s unseen account and the men’s confident retellings preserves the central tension of her role: she matters profoundly to the conflict, while the available narrative gives her little opportunity to define what that history meant to her.