Media & Culture · Books · Airport Books
A breezy romance about two college friends who take one week of vacation together every summer for a decade. Poppy Wright is restless, outgoing, and building a career as a travel writer. Alex Nilsen is steady, introverted, and happiest with a book and a routine. They should not work as friends, but they do.
The story moves between two timelines: flashbacks labeled "Summers Ago" and a present-day trip to Palm Springs. Each past summer adds another layer to how they became inseparable, and why they stopped speaking.
Poppy and Alex meet in college and start an annual tradition: one summer trip per year, just the two of them. Nashville, San Francisco, New Orleans, Vail, Sanibel Island, and more. Over the years the trips become the highlight of both their lives, even as their personalities pull in opposite directions.
Two years before the main story, a trip to Croatia goes wrong. After a drunken kiss, Alex pulls back. Poppy reads it as rejection. Neither says what they actually feel. They stop talking entirely.
Poppy has the travel-writing job she always wanted, but she is stuck and unhappy. When someone asks when she was last truly happy, the answer is obvious: the last trip with Alex. She convinces him to take one more vacation together, this time to Palm Springs for his brother's wedding.
Old chemistry returns quickly. One bed, broken air conditioning, forced proximity, and years of unspoken feelings. They sleep together and admit they are in love. At the airport afterward, Poppy confesses she treated the trip as an escape. Alex takes it the wrong way and they part again.
Back in New York, Poppy starts therapy and realizes she has been running from problems instead of facing them. She also sees that travel never fixed her loneliness; being with Alex did. She flies to his hometown of Linfield to find him.
Alex is afraid they want different lives: her adventure, his stability. Poppy tells him she does not feel alone when they are together. They finally become a couple. In the epilogue they are living in New York, planning their next summer trip, and building a life that blends both worlds.