Croatia

Croatia is the setting of a pivotal journey in Poppy Wright and Alex Nilsen’s history: the trip where they kiss, misread one another’s response, and leave an unresolved hurt that shadows their friendship for years. The journey also sets intimate memories against the work of travel, the demands of a third companion, and the ordinary discomforts of being away together. Its importance lies not only in what happens there, but in how later understanding changes what the trip—and the kiss—meant.

The Trip and Its Setting

Two summers before the present-day events, Poppy and Alex travel to Croatia with Bernard, an older man serving as the official photographer for R+R. Bernard is a recent widower, a loud talker in a fleece vest who often positions himself between the two friends without noticing their exchanged looks. His habit of turning questions into extended stories makes him a vivid presence throughout the trip, and Poppy watches Alex’s replies dwindle to monosyllables as Bernard wears him down.

Together, the three visit Dubrovnik’s Old Town, with its high stone walls and winding streets, and travel farther out to rocky beaches beside the clear turquoise water of the Adriatic Sea. The landscape offers the trip a striking public face: an ancient city and shorelines that could furnish the ideal travel image. But the experience is not a frictionless holiday. The lodging has sleek white-and-steel interiors and balconies overlooking the water, yet its thin walls bring the sounds of small children running and screaming overhead each morning. A persistent dead-animal smell from behind the laundry dryer returns after staff try to mask it with air freshener. The gap between beautiful surroundings and uncomfortable daily life makes the trip more than a postcard setting.

The accommodation also exposes how the travelers’ arrangement has shifted. One room was meant for Poppy and Alex, with two bedrooms, but Bernard occupies it; neither friend presses the point, partly because they feel sympathy for him. The decision is small, but it belongs to the trip’s wider pattern: shared plans must accommodate Bernard’s needs, while Poppy and Alex’s unspoken closeness has no explicit claim on the space they expected to share.

The Kiss and the Misunderstanding

Croatia becomes inseparable from Poppy and Alex’s first kiss. Two years later, Poppy recalls that the memory had seemed to her to mean one thing, only to look different once she learned more about Alex’s feelings. The kiss happened on a drunken whim, when neither of them could be certain what the other intended. Alex feared it might have meant nothing to Poppy; afterward, she acted as though it had meant nothing, rather than risk clarifying her own feelings.

That silence produces a painful reversal in their understanding of the same event. Poppy had believed Alex regretted the kiss and had rejected her. She comes to understand instead that he regretted the circumstances: he had been unsure of her intentions, and then believed she had been careless with his heart. The place’s significance therefore lies less in a declaration than in the absence of one. Croatia holds an experience that could have brought their feelings into the open, but instead becomes a memory each carries under a different interpretation.

What the Journey Leaves Behind

Croatia continues to intrude into the present through memories that arrive bodily as well as mentally. When Poppy and Alex are close, recollections of the trip rise and send urgent sensations through her; she pulls away when his hand rests on her thigh, even as part of her wants to move nearer. The past is not simply recalled as background. It changes how she experiences a present moment and what she feels able to do in it.

The trip also becomes a reference point for later discoveries. When Poppy learns something new about Alex’s life during the two years they have been apart, she recognizes that each revelation presses on the same raw place in her heart. Alex’s back spasms, he tells her, began a couple of months after Croatia. The account does not establish the trip as their cause, but its timing makes Croatia another marker in the period after which his body and their friendship carry consequences she did not know about.

Their distance develops over time rather than being reduced to one uncomplicated break at the Croatian border. After Tuscany, Poppy reflects, she and Alex both step back without discussing it: instead of texting daily, they catch up every few weeks. She also feels she cannot simply return to their earlier closeness, both because of what happened between them and because Trey is part of her life. Croatia’s kiss thus remains central not as the sole explanation for every later change, but as the unresolved event that gives their later restraint its emotional charge.

Reinterpreting the Place

When Poppy eventually understands how Alex experienced the kiss, the memory becomes a form of belated recognition. She sees that both had mistaken the other’s self-protection for a verdict: she read his fear and regret as rejection, while he read her performance of indifference as proof that he had not mattered. The correction does not erase the hurt; it reveals how long each had been living with a different version of the same moment.

Croatia consequently functions as both a real destination and an emotional landmark. Dubrovnik, the Adriatic coastline, the crowded apartment, and Bernard’s talkative company belong to the concrete journey. The kiss and its aftermath turn that journey into a place Poppy revisits in memory, where the meaning of a past action can change without the action itself changing. What once seemed like rejection becomes evidence of mutual uncertainty and unspoken care, making Croatia the location where their friendship’s central romantic possibility becomes impossible to ignore—even as neither knew how to name it at the time.