Three Summers Ago

Three Summers Ago is the novel’s temporal frame for a Tuscany trip that looks, at first, like proof that Poppy Wright and Alex Nilsen have safely left their romantic uncertainty behind. Both have partners, their friendship feels strong, and they expect an easy holiday; yet a pregnancy scare unsettles Poppy’s confidence in that arrangement. The period’s decisive significance lies in the gap between the life that appears to be working and the life Poppy discovers she may want.

Placement and apparent equilibrium

The chapter opens on the night before the Tuscany flight, three weeks after Poppy’s pneumonia episode. She and Alex have not traveled together under such apparently uncomplicated circumstances in years: Poppy is with Trey, Alex and Sarah Torval have reconciled, and both couples seem to fit comfortably around the friendship. Alex says that his relationship with Sarah is better this time and that they are on the same page. Sarah, who had once been less receptive to Poppy, has begun to warm to her; Trey and Alex have also got along in their few meetings.

Poppy experiences these developments as confirmation that it was right for her and Alex never to cross the boundary between friendship and romance. Her happiness is not merely relief that the trip will proceed. She regards the friendship’s survival, alongside the two romantic relationships, as a source of profound contentment. That conviction gives the chapter’s later emotional turn its force: the couple’s apparent stability is real, but it does not settle every question about what Poppy wants.

The opening exchange briefly tests that stability. When Alex texts the night before departure to ask whether they can talk and finalize plans, Poppy immediately fears he is about to cancel, even though she recognizes that the fear does not make sense. Rather than continue texting, she calls him from a folding chair on her balcony. She is home alone; Trey is at Good Boy Bar near her new apartment, and she has left the evening early because nausea warns her that a migraine may be coming. The small interruption of an otherwise happy preparation makes the trip’s ease feel newly vulnerable before it has even begun.

The Tuscany trip and the missed period

The holiday initially sustains its celebratory surface. After a celebration, Trey makes mojitos, and the group sits on chaise lounges overlooking the valley. Poppy barely drinks because she has felt nauseated all evening. She excuses herself to bed well before the others; Trey comes later, tipsy, and they have sex before he falls asleep. Her nausea returns, and she realizes that she was due to start her period during the trip. She considers ordinary explanations for feeling sick while traveling internationally and notes that she and Trey are fairly careful, but neither thought removes the uncertainty.

The pregnancy test turns that private worry into a moment shared with Alex. At daybreak, while Alex is preparing to run because the air is cooler before sunrise, Poppy stands on the terrace looking over the valley. Without turning to face him, she begins to cry. Alex reaches for her hand and opens it to find the test clenched there. He is silent for ten seconds before asking softly whether she has taken one yet. The gesture and pause carry the scene’s tension: Poppy’s fear is visible before she explains it, and Alex responds by making room for her uncertainty rather than forcing an answer.

After Alex leaves for his run, Poppy is alone on the terrace. Twenty-five minutes later, while she is scrambling eggs for breakfast, her period arrives. The rest of the trip becomes, in outward terms, a fantastically normal couples’ holiday. But the practical resolution does not restore Poppy’s earlier ease. She is heartbroken, and the contrast between an ordinary breakfast and the intensity of that feeling makes the discovery harder to dismiss. The scare does not establish that she had made a conscious decision to become pregnant; it reveals that the possibility, and its disappearance, has touched a desire she had not resolved.

What the episode changes

The episode’s emotional turn is not a breakup or an overt confession. The couples remain together, the trip continues, and the friendship between Poppy and Alex stays within its established boundary. What changes is Poppy’s understanding of the cost of wanting incompatible things. Her heartbreak gives personal weight to the thought that a person can long for several forms of happiness that cannot coexist in the same life. The trip therefore preserves its visible normality while exposing a fracture beneath it.

That tension sharpens the earlier confidence that Poppy and Alex were right never to let anything happen between them. Their platonic arrangement still seems to work socially: they travel with partners, their partners get along, and the trip proceeds. Yet Poppy’s reaction to the end of the pregnancy possibility suggests that emotional security cannot be measured only by whether the arrangements remain intact. The chapter holds both truths together rather than converting the scare into an immediate decision or resolution.

Travel and the wider chronology

The Tuscany episode also sits within a larger contrast between travel as lived experience and travel as a polished product. Elsewhere, Poppy’s travel posts serve an audience of about one hundred thousand followers, and she recognizes the pressure to show a beach vacation as a beach vacation. On Sanibel Island, however, she and Alex spend only about forty minutes on the shore in a week. They pass the rest of the time in bars, restaurants, bookstores, vintage shops, and their rented bungalow, eating popcorn and watching lightning while a Twilight Zone marathon plays. The mismatch between the expected sunny holiday and the actual indoor, storm-bound week complicates the ideal of travel as a reliably beautiful escape.

Poppy’s work makes that mismatch more consequential. When she proposes Palm Springs for an R+R-funded trip, she tries to frame the summer low season as an opportunity: the destination is less crowded and cheaper, and the story could return to her roots in budget travel. Swapna Bakshi-Highsmith points out that the brand is aspirational and that the idea would need to wait for the winter issue. Later, Poppy anticipates arriving at resorts with Alex and their worn T.J. Maxx luggage, where champagne will be waiting. The contrast captures how her professional trips have moved away from the informal journeys that once shaped her sense of connection.

In retrospect, Poppy explains that travel had once eased her loneliness because chance encounters let her open up to people without the baggage of shared history. As her R+R assignments came to center on chefs and hotel managers seeking publicity, even impressive trips left her feeling empty. This later understanding gives the Tuscany chapter a wider resonance without changing what happens there: a trip can look successful, and a life can look settled, while leaving its central emotional question untouched. Three Summers Ago records one such interval, when apparent happiness remains genuine but proves insufficient to tell Poppy what she wants.