The two years Poppy and Alex lost touch

The two years Poppy and Alex lost touch are the aftermath of their rupture in Croatia: a period in which each withdraws, and in which the absence of conversation becomes its own accumulating loss. For Poppy, the silence is not proof that she has stopped caring. She keeps Alex at the top of her phone’s favorites, unable to delete him even after so much time has passed. When she finally reaches for her phone, the possibility of contact is still there; what she cannot know is whether their old closeness can be entered again as if nothing happened.

The Silence and Its Causes

Poppy later recognizes that she fled more than one difficult situation. She had left Linfield and the University of Chicago, and, in her own reckoning, she had also fled Alex when their friendship broke. She does not absolve him: she understands that he fled her too. But she refuses to make his withdrawal the whole explanation. She remembers being terrified, running, and leaving him to fix what had happened. The two years apart therefore hold both mutual estrangement and Poppy’s belated recognition of her own part in it.

That recognition complicates her wish to recover the friendship. In the silence, she has had time to imagine what she might say, but the imagined openings feel false when contact becomes possible. She first types that she has been thinking about Alex, then erases it. A more practical invitation to get out of town also seems too casual: it would treat them as friends who could still arrange a trip informally, without acknowledging the rupture. The message she finally sends is only “Hey.” Its smallness gives her a way to reach him without naming everything she cannot yet say, but also leaves the conversation with no easy next step.

Lives Unshared

When Poppy and Alex meet again, the years of silence become tangible through what each has missed. Poppy learns that Alex has bought and is repairing his grandparents’ house. His grandmother Betty left it to his father, who intended to sell it; Alex moved in and began working on it. Poppy had not known about this change in his life, and the news hurts not simply as a fact about a house but as one instance of the many developments she could not share with him.

She also learns that Betty has died. Poppy had met her only a few times but loved her; Alex describes her death as peaceful and folds the straw wrappers into small, precise squares while speaking. Poppy realizes that Betty had been one of his favorite family members, perhaps tied with David. She is sorry both for Betty’s death and for not having been told. Her grief is sharpened by the knowledge that Alex was unsure she wanted to hear from him. Their reunion thus exposes the reciprocal cost of the silence: he withheld news because he doubted her openness, while she experiences each unshared event as evidence of the life she lost access to.

Contact Without Repair

Poppy wants to ask whether Alex had also considered reaching out—whether he had typed messages and left them unsent, or nearly called. She wonders whether he, too, feels that the two years cost him part of his life, and why he let the estrangement continue. What she wants is larger than an explanation: she longs for their former ease, when they could tell each other anything and being together did not carry loneliness. But these questions remain unasked. The server arrives with the check, Poppy reaches for it, and when Alex asks whether it is an R+R card, she lies that the publication reimburses them. Her discomfort at the deception is immediate, yet she does not take the lie back.

Outside, they cross the parking lot in silence. The day’s heat has broken, but the emotional pressure of the meeting remains; brushing against what happened in Croatia has made the past feel present again. Poppy had believed they could leave it behind. Instead, she understands that each new thing she learns about Alex’s intervening life will press on the same raw place. She suspects the separation affects him too, while recognizing that he is practiced at containing feelings he does not wish to share. On the ride home, she privately wishes she could undo what happened if doing so would repair the distance. The wish is not a reconciliation: it marks how much she wants one and how little she can control its terms.

The Distance at the Story’s Edge

The two years apart also shape Poppy’s attempt to resume contact through a summer trip. Her first text receives a one-word greeting in return. Stunned, she nearly answers as though Alex had initiated the exchange, then acknowledges to herself that she was the one who reached out. The reply offers no natural opening, turning a minimal sign of contact into another moment of uncertainty. The later face-to-face meeting repeats that pattern: after Poppy flies to find Alex, they exchange a quiet greeting, and she waits for more to come, but nothing does.

These encounters make the lost time visible without pretending it has been repaired. Poppy and Alex can meet, speak, and discover what has happened in each other’s lives, yet neither the text nor the reunion restores their former intimacy at once. The interval is defined by that tension: the attachment persists, but silence has allowed grief, changed circumstances, and unanswered questions to gather between them. Its significance lies not only in the years without conversation, but in the difficult work of acknowledging what those years made impossible to know.