Poppy Wright and Rachel Krohn

Poppy Wright and Rachel Krohn’s friendship is both Poppy’s first close connection in New York City and a steady counterweight to her tendency to seek answers by escaping somewhere new. Rachel offers affection without simply endorsing Poppy’s assumptions: she challenges her, asks her to look back at when she was last happy, and urges her to remain with difficult feelings rather than flee them. As Poppy’s career and life cease to satisfy her, that mix of intimacy and pragmatism helps turn an inarticulate crisis into questions she can begin to face.

Friendship and shared working lives

Rachel is the first friend Poppy makes after moving to New York City, and the two recognize a practical kinship in each other’s online work. Rachel is a style blogger and social media influencer; Poppy has built a following as a long-term route toward making travel her full-time profession. Their different paths nevertheless lead to a shared experience of being, in effect, living advertisements. They can understand why the other might need to pause over a meal to stage photographs, a small accommodation that makes their internet-facing work part of their friendship rather than an embarrassment between them.

The friendship begins through one of Rachel’s promotional restaurant invitations. Rachel has been asked to eat at Guillermo’s new restaurant in exchange for posting photographs, and Poppy accompanies her. By the time Rachel recommends Santorini over rosé at a café, the professional overlap has become part of an established companionship: Rachel can offer travel advice as a friend, while Poppy’s work and ambitions remain familiar to her. Their shared knowledge of staged online images does not mean that they approach that work in the same way. Poppy initially treats social media as a long game intended to enable a different career; Rachel arrived at it through her photogenic appearance, lifestyle, and dogs.

Rachel’s public image is carefully made, but her attitude toward it is notably unsentimental. She takes photographs for the week on Tuesdays, changing outfits and hair between locations, then spends the rest of the week writing essays and doing social media work for dog rescues. She keeps influencer work because it pays bills and brings useful goods, not because she prizes manufactured celebrity. At each month’s end, she posts unedited outtakes with a disclaimer explaining that the feed is curated imagery designed to make viewers long for a life that does not exist, and that she is paid for it. The post does not diminish her popularity. Poppy sometimes arranges wine dates for those final days of the month, watching Rachel roll her eyes as likes and follows accumulate and as followers mistake her candor for access to the whole person. Their friendship therefore rests partly on a shared fluency in online performance, but Rachel’s bluntness also helps Poppy see the distance between an attractive public image and a satisfying life.

Candor during Poppy’s unhappiness

When Poppy begins questioning the life she worked to build, Rachel meets her distress with a practical question rather than easy reassurance. Poppy says she has done everything right, earned a job at a leading travel magazine, and acquired an apartment and greater financial comfort, yet remains unhappy. Rachel punctures the sweeping account by reminding her that she also left college. Her response is characteristic of their closeness: she can interrupt Poppy’s self-narrative, while Poppy can admit the painful conclusion beneath it.

Rachel helps Poppy consider how happiness might be recovered. Recalling advice from her mother, psychologist Sandra Krohn, Rachel suggests that Poppy retrace her steps and identify the last time she was truly happy. The question prompts Poppy to recognize that the answer involves Alex Nilsen. After Poppy blurts this out following an exercise class, Rachel stops and grips her arm, startled by the disclosure. She then argues that Poppy should call Alex and confront what happened, because losing such an important friendship over one fight seems senseless to her. Rachel’s view is direct, but she does not mistake it for control over Poppy’s choices: when Poppy explains that she has already texted Alex and believes he does not want to restore their friendship or take a spontaneous trip, Rachel listens.

Poppy turns the conversation toward inviting Rachel instead, proposing a trip together. Rachel says that leaving New York makes her anxious. That limit matters: Rachel is not presented as a ready-made answer to every problem or as someone who shares Poppy’s appetite for travel. Their closeness allows her to say no to the idea as first proposed, even while she continues helping Poppy think through what the wish to travel is meant to solve.

Support that leads toward staying

After Poppy returns from Palm Springs, her distress is difficult to conceal. She has been exercising for roughly four hours each night so that she can sleep, but wakes exhausted and moves through the day with little energy left to wonder whether Alex will answer her calls. The job that once represented success has begun to feel as tiring as her old bartending work in Ohio. Poppy struggles to make her life add up and repeatedly finds herself acknowledging that she is having a hard time. Rachel notices the change and gives Poppy a concrete next step rather than treating the funk as a passing mood.

Poppy contacts Rachel to ask whether her mother is accepting new patients. Rachel answers with a teasing, affirmative exchange, and Poppy begins seeing Sandra Krohn. The therapist’s brownstone office in Brooklyn is warm and crowded with books, plants, dark wood, and stained glass. In the first session, Poppy expects little to say about the past, then talks for fifty-six minutes about her parents, school, and the first trip home with Guillermo. The detail marks a shift in what Poppy is willing to examine: she has shared this history only with Alex before, and now she is speaking about it in therapy.

Rachel is not merely the link to her mother. She makes Poppy promise to continue for at least a couple of months and warns her not to run from what the sessions bring up. Poppy recognizes the force of that advice: figuring out what comes next requires staying in the discomfort, including in weekly therapy, at her job, and in her mostly empty apartment. Rachel’s support thus does not simply help Poppy plan another departure. It encourages her to remain present in the places and routines she has been tempted to abandon.

Loyalty, limits, and the choice to go

When Poppy decides she is going to quit her job, she arrives at the wine bar already crying. Rachel jumps up from their usual table, visibly alarmed, and asks whether Poppy is all right. Poppy tells her she plans to leave the job; Rachel’s surprised response registers the weight of the announcement without pretending to know its resolution. In the next chapter, Rachel makes her loyalty explicit: if Poppy needs her, she will buy a ticket on the way to the airport and go with her. Rachel looks deeply uneasy even as she offers, making the offer meaningful precisely because travel does not come easily to her.

Poppy replies by noting that Rachel is needed to keep them informed about everything happening in New York. The exchange holds both women’s attachments in view: Poppy is considering leaving, while Rachel is prepared to cross a boundary she normally avoids, but neither treats their friendship as a reason to erase the other’s preferences. Rachel’s care is practical and personal, not a claim that she must accompany Poppy or solve her life.

Poppy later explains to Alex that travel once helped because chance encounters let her meet people, feel connected, and imagine that others could love her. The work trips changed that pattern: they brought her into contact with chefs and hotel managers who wanted coverage, and the trips left her feeling empty despite their attractions. She concludes that restarting her travel blog and meeting new people would not, by itself, make her happy. Rachel’s friendship illuminates the distinction at the center of this realization. She is part of the New York life Poppy has built, but her support does not reduce happiness to staying put; she can offer to leave with Poppy while also helping her understand that movement alone is not connection. The evidence leaves their friendship poised at that decision rather than resolving what Poppy ultimately does with Rachel’s offer.