The pregnancy scare during the Tuscany trip turns a possible pregnancy into a test of what Poppy and Alex mean to each other. Poppy’s period arrives and all three tests are negative, but the episode does not simply restore the trip to normal: Alex’s fear of losing her becomes visible, while Poppy is left grieving a future she cannot yet claim. Its later consequences show that the scare helped expose the love Alex had been hiding, and that his response shaped decisions affecting both Poppy and Sarah Torval.

Causes and Background

During the trip, Poppy is traveling with Trey, her boyfriend. After a night when she has felt nauseated, she realizes that her period was due at some point during the trip. She initially tries to account for the symptoms without assuming pregnancy: international travel can cause nausea, she and Trey are fairly careful, and drinking a great deal of red wine could also explain how she feels. But the period is late, and these ordinary explanations cannot quiet her fear.

The scare arises within a trip that otherwise has the form of a couples’ vacation. That context sharpens the contrast between what Poppy is doing—traveling with Trey—and the person she turns to when the possibility becomes frightening: Alex. The episode does not present her fear as a settled wish to become a parent. Rather, the tests force her to confront the possibility, her dependence on Alex, and the life she might want, all before she can make sense of those desires.

The Night of the Tests

Poppy’s panic sends her out alone to find a twenty-four-hour grocery store thirty-eight minutes away by car. She returns to the villa with three different pregnancy tests before dawn. On the terrace, she paces with the most expensive test in her hand and tries to regulate her breathing. The physical urgency of the scene—her racing thoughts, the repeated pacing, the effort to inhale and exhale—makes the uncertainty immediate rather than abstract.

Alex finds her while preparing to run in the cooler hours before sunrise. Poppy has not told him what is wrong; when he comes to stand beside her, she begins to cry. He takes her hand and opens it to see the test she has been gripping. The pause that follows gives the moment weight: Alex does not rush to explain away the danger or make the decision for her. He tells her to take the test and says that they will work out what comes next, with the decision about what she wants remaining hers.

Poppy urinates on all three tests at once. She and Alex set them in a row on the low stone wall around the terrace, and he sets a timer on his watch. They wait together without speaking until it rings. Each result is negative. The three separate results close off the immediate fear of pregnancy, but do not erase what the waiting has exposed between them.

What the Scare Reveals

After the results, Poppy apologizes for needing Alex. He tells her that he needs her too, and she realizes that he is crying. He explains that he does not know what he would do if something happened to her. Poppy understands his reaction in light of his mother’s death: for Alex, the possibility of pregnancy is bound up not only with a life-changing event but with the fear that Poppy herself could die. The scene links his present distress to bereavement without suggesting that he can control or resolve that fear.

The exchange also makes care reciprocal. Alex has come to stand beside Poppy, helped her wait through the tests, and left the decision with her; now his tears reveal that he is not simply the composed companion supporting someone else’s panic. Poppy’s need for him is spoken aloud, and his answer makes plain that the attachment runs both ways. At this point, however, the episode does not turn that recognition into a declaration of their relationship or a change in their circumstances.

Aftermath and Later Consequences

Alex leaves for his morning run after Poppy promises that she will be okay. Twenty-five minutes later, while she is scrambling eggs for breakfast, her period begins. The trip then continues as an outwardly ordinary couples’ vacation, but Poppy is heartbroken. The negative tests and the arrival of her period settle the immediate question; they do not settle what she has learned about wanting a future that may not fit the life she is living.

Alex later explains how far the scare reached into his own choices. He says that, frightened by the possibility that Poppy was pregnant, he got a vasectomy without asking Sarah what she thought. Soon afterward, he saw an antique yellow-gold Art Deco ring with a pearl and imagined it as an engagement ring, then recognized that he was making consequential decisions for a future centered on Poppy. He ended his relationship with Sarah that day. This later account does not make the pregnancy scare a simple cause of every change in their lives, but it identifies it as a turning point in Alex’s understanding of his love and in his relationship with Sarah.

The event’s force comes from its double outcome. The feared pregnancy does not occur, and the vacation resumes; nevertheless, the terrace becomes the setting where Poppy’s reliance on Alex and his terror of losing her are impossible to treat as incidental. Her heartbreak afterward preserves the emotional tension the tests cannot answer: the question is no longer only whether she is pregnant, but what kind of life, and whose closeness, she wants.