Seven summers earlier, Poppy and Alex take their annual trip to New Orleans and fall easily into their usual rhythm of walking, eating, drinking, and inventing games together. Poppy loves the city’s chaos and color, while Alex is fascinated by its architecture, and they adopt theatrical alter egos, Gladys and Keith Vivant, whose rule is that “theme matters.” The joke gives them a shared language for the week and highlights how naturally they make each other playful in ways they are not with other people.

As they move through bars, shops, museums, karaoke, and tourist stops, Poppy reflects on her new life in New York and on dating Guillermo, a chef she genuinely likes because he is warm, steady, and easy to be with. She tells Alex about Guillermo’s good qualities because she wants Alex to approve of him, but she withholds one comment of Guillermo’s that unsettled her. In return, Alex tells Poppy he recently reconnected with Sarah, an old crush from college, and Poppy encourages him to pursue that possibility because she believes both of them should be happy and thinks the romantic “what-if” between them has been resolved.

The trip continues with comic intimacy: they survive a disappointing cemetery tour by joking with the guide, abandon Guillermo’s carefully prepared recommendations to wander on their last night, and move from a goth bar to a country-western bar purely for the sake of the theme. Even when Alex dislikes parts of the experience, he joins in for Poppy’s sake, and Poppy notices how affectionate and accommodating he is with her. Their ease together culminates when they stop in the street to watch a brass band and end up slow-dancing clumsily in public, sharing a private, tender moment in the middle of the crowd.

After the dance, Alex picks up dirty Mardi Gras beads for Poppy, puts them around her neck, and lets her save an unflattering photo of them together instead of deleting it. Poppy is struck by how much she loves being the one person who gets to see all of Alex and who can draw out this version of him. The small moments of care and trust deepen her feeling that being with Alex makes her most fully herself.

Back at the apartment, Poppy persuades Alex to let her read one of his short stories while he showers. The story, about a winged boy who is pressured to fly and becomes happiest only after losing the expectation that he must, affects her powerfully and unexpectedly. Poppy realizes Alex’s writing makes her feel understood in a way she has rarely experienced, easing a lifelong sense of isolation and confirming that as long as she has Alex, she will never feel entirely alone.