Hardin’s copy of Wuthering Heights

Hardin’s copy of Wuthering Heights accompanies Tessa through the breakup and its aftermath, turning a familiar book into a tangible remnant of her shared life with Hardin. She takes it from their apartment as she leaves, encounters it again among belongings soaked at a motel, and later carries it back from her car while discovering Hardin’s birthday gift. Its repeated appearance ties literature to the relationship’s changing material circumstances: separation, dislocation, and an unfinished connection.

Taken from the Apartment

As Tessa hurriedly packs her clothes and books, she instinctively adds Hardin’s copy of Wuthering Heights to an empty box. The gesture is more than ordinary packing. She reasons that Hardin will not miss it and that she is owed the book after what he has taken from her. Her claim is pointedly personal: the book belongs to him, but she carries it away as part of the emotional reckoning that follows their breakup.

The copy leaves the apartment alongside her own books, while a framed photograph of Tessa and Hardin smiling before Ken’s wedding is smashed and torn apart. These objects register contrasting responses to the same shared past. The photograph is deliberately destroyed; the novel is kept. Tessa does not explain the distinction, but her instinctive choice gives the book a different function from the image: it remains usable, and its literary and personal associations can travel with her even as she rejects the appearance of happiness captured in the picture.

A Book Displaced and Damaged

The book next appears among Tessa’s belongings at a motel, where a man helping her gather her things hands her a soaked copy of Wuthering Heights. Her other recovered items include wet sweaters and a copy of Pride and Prejudice. The novel’s damaged state makes the object conspicuous in a way an intact book might not be. It has passed from a bedroom shelf or bedside life into the disorder of belongings carried elsewhere, and it is now physically marked by that displacement.

The encounter also brings the book into an unexpected social moment. Tessa has begun to explain why she is there, but the man offers a practical account of his own arrival and helps with her things instead. He notices the classics among her possessions, including the soaked novel, and responds with a friendly smile. The book therefore works not only as a private reminder of Hardin but as visible evidence of Tessa’s reading interests, legible to someone who does not share their history. Its condition, however, resists any impression of a neat new beginning: what she has brought with her is still entangled with the disruption that preceded it.

The Birthday Gift and the Return to Reading

After returning from Seattle, Tessa pays for two more nights at the motel and goes to her car to retrieve her bag. There she notices an e-reader and finds a note identifying it as a birthday gift from Hardin. Her response is mixed: the present moves her, although she has preferred physical books and has only recently become more open to a portable reading device. She can also see a practical use for it in carrying work submissions without printing them.

Before returning to her room, she picks up Hardin’s copy of Wuthering Heights from the floorboard. The juxtaposition matters. The new device is a gift designed to hold many books, while the old copy remains a single, familiar object that Tessa can physically retrieve and carry back with her. When she turns on the e-reader, she finds a tab named Tess containing a long list of novels that she and Hardin have discussed, argued about, or laughed over. The scene places the copy within a larger history of shared reading, without making the book itself equivalent to that entire history. Tessa smiles and then sobs at what the device preserves; the physical novel is beside that discovery, linking Hardin’s chosen present to an existing object from their life together.

Material Memory and Literary Connection

The copy’s narrative force comes from recurrence rather than from any stated explanation of its symbolism. It is taken as something Tessa feels entitled to keep, appears soaked among the belongings displaced to the motel, and is recovered from the car when Hardin’s birthday gift prompts her to return to reading. Across these scenes, its location changes while its association with Hardin persists. The book is not simply a reference to a classic novel: it is a shared possession with a specific history in Tessa’s hands.

Its contrast with the e-reader sharpens that history. The electronic device offers portability and a curated record of books the two discussed; the battered physical copy carries the immediate trace of Tessa’s departure and the journey that followed. Neither object resolves the separation. Instead, their conjunction makes the past present in two different forms: as an organized list of shared conversations and as a single book she has repeatedly carried with her. Hardin’s copy of Wuthering Heights thus gives the novel’s literary connection a material afterlife, surviving the break in the relationship and remaining part of Tessa’s unsettled movement forward.