Poppy Wright and Guillermo

Poppy Wright and Guillermo’s relationship begins in New York City with an easy warmth and the promise of a life that can fit alongside Poppy’s own. Guillermo, a chef she meets through Rachel Krohn’s restaurant promotion, becomes her boyfriend after they agree to stop seeing other people. Their affection is real, but the relationship also exposes Poppy’s fear that the qualities Guillermo loves in her may be inseparable from the social world he does not understand. After he meets her family in Linfield, that fear becomes central to their breakup; later, Poppy remembers both his kindness and the painful sense that he sees her through a lens of pity.

Meeting and Early Courtship

Poppy meets Guillermo a couple of months after moving to New York City. Rachel, her new friend, has been invited to eat for free at Guillermo’s new restaurant in exchange for posting photographs on social media, and Poppy goes along as a fellow internet personality. The arrangement is part of Rachel’s usual work, and Poppy’s association with her has a measurable effect: after remaining around thirty-six thousand subscribers for six months, Poppy’s count rises to fifty-five thousand through association with Rachel’s brand.

After the meal, Guillermo comes out to speak with them. Poppy finds him handsome and sweet, with soft brown eyes and dark hair swept back from his forehead; his laugh strikes her as gentle and unassuming. Before she has even posted the photographs she took, he finds her through Rachel and messages her on Instagram. Poppy appreciates that he tells her plainly how he found her, without embarrassment. His openness becomes one of the small foundations of their attraction: he does not pretend their meeting was independent of the social-media connection that brought them together.

Because Guillermo works most nights, their first date is breakfast. He kisses Poppy when he picks her up rather than waiting until the end of the date to do so. At first, both continue seeing other people. Several weeks into dating, they decide neither wants to see anyone else. Guillermo laughs as he tells her, and Poppy laughs too, partly because she has become accustomed to offering encouraging laughter in his company. The exchange is affectionate, but it also shows how readily she adjusts to his manner.

A Relationship with Room Around It

Poppy distinguishes the relationship from her earlier one with Julian: being with Guillermo is not all-consuming or unpredictable. They see each other two or three times a week, and she likes that the relationship leaves space for the rest of her life. That space includes spin classes and long walks in Central Park with Rachel, gallery openings, and special movie nights at neighborhood bars. Poppy experiences New York as friendlier than she had been led to expect. Rachel explains that many New Yorkers are not unfriendly so much as busy; Guillermo responds differently, gently cupping Poppy’s jaw and telling her she is sweet and that he hopes the city will not change her.

The comment is tender, and Poppy recognizes it as an expression of affection. It also unsettles her. She wonders whether what Guillermo loves most about her is not something essential but a changeable quality that could be stripped away by a few years in the right climate. Her concern is not that he is cruel to her; it is that his warmth may depend on a version of her that he sees as fixed, even though she knows herself to be shaped by place and experience.

Guillermo’s work and interests also become part of their shared life. As a chef, he gives Poppy a practical introduction to restaurants and food, and she describes having a chef for a boyfriend as an advantage. When she later travels through New Orleans with Alex Nilsen, she finds that half the places they visit come from Guillermo’s recommendations, including a small po’boy shop she loves. Before the trip, Guillermo writes down what he remembers from his own visit, adding prices and suggestions about what to order and marking his must-eat places. The list carries his care beyond the relationship: even after the breakup, his knowledge helps shape a trip Poppy enjoys.

Linfield and the Strain of Difference

The relationship’s deeper strain emerges when Guillermo accompanies Poppy to Linfield for her mother’s birthday. In the weeks before the visit, Poppy debates whether to warn him about her family. She fears that doing so would feel like treason, as though she were admitting that there was something wrong with them. She knows her family can be loud and messy, but she also regards them as amazing, kind, and funny; she resents the possibility that she might be embarrassed by people who helped make her who she is. She assumes Guillermo will love them because he loves her.

At the end of their first night in Linfield, Poppy and Guillermo retreat to her childhood bedroom. He tells her that he understands her better than ever and says he understands why she had to flee to New York City. His tone remains tender and warm, but Poppy hears sympathy in it rather than love. She does not correct him. She has moved away from Linfield, but not because she fled her family; she has kept her family apart from the rest of her life to protect them from judgment and herself from a familiar feeling of rejection.

The rest of the visit feels uncomfortable to Poppy. Guillermo remains kind to her family, yet after his remark she interprets every interaction through what she experiences as condescension and pity. The distinction matters: the book does not show him behaving unkindly toward them, but it does show how his understanding of Poppy’s departure makes her fear that he has mistaken her attachment to home for escape from it. She tries to set the trip aside and return to the happiness they share in New York City, telling herself that his failure to understand her family need not cancel his love for her.

Breakup and Aftermath

A few weeks later, Poppy and Guillermo attend a dinner party at the brownstone of one of his friends from boarding school. The host has a trust fund and a Damien Hirst painting above the dining-room table. When someone mentions the artist’s name, Poppy asks who he is; the guests laugh because they believe she is joking, not because they intend to mock her. Poppy remembers the moment vividly, aware of the difference between the room’s assumptions and her own experience in it.

Four days later, Guillermo ends the relationship. He says they are too different, that they were swept up in their chemistry, and that they want different things in the long term. Poppy does not claim that he left her because she did not recognize Damien Hirst, but she pointedly refuses to rule out the possibility. The timing gives the breakup a sharp social context without making the dinner-party misunderstanding its definite cause: Guillermo names a broad incompatibility, while Poppy is left wondering whether the class and cultural distance she felt in that room had become part of his judgment of their future.

The breakup has immediate practical consequences. It comes six weeks after Poppy takes the plunge and moves into Guillermo’s apartment, leaving her scrambling to find another place. She has to rent an apartment at the high end of her price range, pay for a U-Haul for the second time in two months, and replace furniture she had discarded because Guillermo already owned better versions. They had kept her dresser because his had a broken leg and her bedside table because he had only one; most of what remained in the apartment had been his. When she moves out, she steals one of his expensive cooking knives. The small act sits beside the larger imbalance of the move: shared domestic life had been arranged around his possessions, and its end leaves Poppy rebuilding a home quickly and at financial cost.

What the Relationship Leaves Behind

By the time Poppy travels with Alex, she is still conscious of Guillermo as someone whose opinion matters to her. In New Orleans, she repeatedly considers telling Alex about Guillermo’s comment that the city might change her. She stops herself because she wants Alex to like Guillermo and worries Alex might take offense on her behalf. Instead, she tells Alex about Guillermo’s calmness, easy laughter, passion for his work, and love of food, and says she believes Alex will like him. The omission reveals Poppy managing how the two men might understand each other, while her praise preserves a sincere account of what she valued in Guillermo.

The relationship therefore remains more complicated than either a simple romance or a straightforward failure. Guillermo offers affection, attentiveness, culinary enthusiasm, and a relationship that does not consume Poppy’s life. At the same time, the visit to Linfield exposes how quickly his sympathy can feel to her like a judgment on the people and place she still loves. Their breakup turns on the claim that they want different things, but Poppy’s memories keep returning to the question of whether being loved by someone also means being understood: not as someone who fled her family, but as someone who left home while remaining attached to it.