Hardin’s relapse into heavy drinking

Hardin’s relapse into heavy drinking is a recurring response to emotional distress that makes his conflict with Tessa more dangerous rather than less painful. It begins with a night of drinking driven by jealousy and fear of being left behind, contributes to a lie that becomes entangled with Tessa’s car accident, and worsens after she leaves him: he empties his beer supply, smashes a bottle, and eventually spends an entire day drinking while they are apart.

The return to drinking

Hardin’s first clear return to heavy drinking follows a collision between his uncertainty about Tessa and his resentment of other people’s advice. After hearing Landon speak confidently about his future, and hearing Tessa mention Zed in her sleep, Hardin interprets both as evidence that she may not be sure about him. He writes her a note, leaves it on the dresser, and goes out into the night.

On the way to the Canal Street Tavern, he considers avoiding it in case Nate and the group are still there, but turns instead toward a nearby bar where he used to drink regularly. He dismisses Tessa’s warning not to drink again after his previous excess and insists internally that he needs a drink. His thoughts also circle around the possibility of moving to Seattle with her: he imagines that she would eventually tire of him, leaving him in a city where he felt he had been brought in only to be pushed out again. Drinking begins, then, not in isolation from the relationship but amid an attempt to evade its uncertainties.

At the bar, a familiar blonde bartender, Carly, recognizes him and recalls their past nights together. Hardin asks her for a drink. By the following afternoon he is in Carly’s kitchen, admitting to himself that he has no one else to blame for the previous night’s overreaction. He acknowledges that he spoke harshly to Tessa, while trying to avoid taking responsibility for it. Carly offers him a ride back to his car, and he follows her with a pounding head, regretting how much he drank—and that he drank at all.

The lie and its consequences

The morning after the binge, Hardin compares Carly unfavorably with Tessa: Carly’s behavior on the drive strikes him as careless, while Tessa seems different from Carly and from the other women he has known. The contrast does not make him more honest. Rereading Tessa’s messages, he worries that she is concerned and cannot think of a convincing explanation, so he texts that he fell asleep in his car after drinking too much with Landon. In reality, he had been with Carly.

When Hardin later waits for Tessa at their apartment, he opens a fourth beer and spins its cap on the coffee table. He considers ending the uncertainty by telling her he slept with Carly, although he later maintains that he did not have sex with her and had only stayed at her house. The accumulating empty bottles make his drinking visible when Landon arrives. Landon confronts him for getting drunk while Tessa is injured and has a concussion, and identifies Hardin’s text as the one she was trying to read when she crashed. He also says Tessa recognized immediately that the message was a lie. Hardin rejects responsibility, claiming the crash was not his fault and that he had tried to speak with her; Landon directly challenges that denial.

The episode links the relapse to a pattern of concealment as well as to alcohol itself. Hardin’s drinking helps produce the false account of his whereabouts, while his subsequent effort to excuse the lie leaves Tessa and Landon to deal with its consequences. The beer bottles in the apartment are not merely background: they become evidence of his state at the very moment Landon demands that he face what has happened to her.

Drinking during the separation

After Tessa leaves, Hardin spends the night waiting for her to return. He sits on the floor expecting to hear her footsteps or her voice, but she does not come back. He finishes the beer in the refrigerator and smashes it against the wall. The gesture turns private drinking into visible destruction, and the following morning confirms that the rupture has not passed: Tessa is still gone.

Hardin packs his belongings and heads to the airport to leave Washington. He does not call his mother first; he departs with alcohol on his breath and stains on his white T-shirt. In his thoughts, he makes the flight conditional on Tessa’s silence, telling himself that he would turn around if she called before he boarded. At the same time, he minimizes his own conduct, describing his lie as small and her response as an overreaction. He also resents that she brought Zed to his home and that Landon confronted him there. His departure is thus accompanied by blame-shifting even as his intoxicated appearance records the depth of the crisis.

Escalation and significance

The separation does not immediately interrupt the drinking. Hardin recalls that, on the eighth day, he drank for the entire day and could not stop. He hoped each drink would make Tessa’s face leave his mind, but it remained there. His self-reproach surfaces alongside the binge: he tells himself to get his life together, repeating the demand rather than describing any successful change. The recurrence shows alcohol functioning as an attempted suppression of attachment that fails on its own terms.

Across these episodes, the relapse shifts from a single night out to a sustained response to rejection, guilt, and separation. Hardin’s fear of being displaced by Tessa’s imagined future in Seattle precedes the first binge; after his lie, the drinking continues even while Tessa is injured; after the breakup, it becomes an all-day inability to stop. The pattern offers no resolution to the relationship conflict. Instead, it intensifies secrecy and denial, damages his ability to respond responsibly, and leaves his longing for Tessa present beneath every attempt to drink it away.