Lizet Ramirez comes home to Miami for Thanksgiving during her freshman year of college to find her family turned upside down: Her parents are divorced, her Papi has sold her childhood home in Hialeah, and her Mami, her sister Leidy, and her infant nephew Dante have moved into an apartment in Little Havana. Lizet feels isolated from her home community since leaving for college; no one understands her desire to leave southern Florida, and she is called a traitor for even applying. She left behind a boyfriend, Omar, who still loves her, but from whom she’s growing apart.

Lizet’s return to Miami coincides with the day fishermen come across a five-year-old Cuban boy, Ariel Hernandez, floating on a raft in the ocean. Ariel’s fate becomes both city’s and the community’s obsession. Meanwhile, back at Rawlings, Lizet is placed on academic probation with the threat of expulsion for accidentally plagiarizing an English paper. In addition to feeling like she’s falling behind academically, she also feels stressed about money, a concern that seems alien to the well-to-do students around her.

Things escalate at Christmas, when Mami is so involved in Ariel-related activism that she refuses to come home. Omar proposes; Lizet accepts but is hesitant, especially since she is beginning to develop romantic feelings for a boy named Ethan at school. When Lizet is offered a paid summer internship in California by her biology professor, she wants to go but fears leaving Leidy and Dante home all summer with Mami in such a state.

Lizet goes home for Easter to try to rescue Mami but fails, and she is across the street from Ariel Hernandez’s house when he is deported in the middle of the night. When Lizet returns home a few weeks later for the summer, she realizes she can’t be in Miami anymore and impulsively leaves for California to take the lab internship after all. This choice fractures her relationship with Mami and Leidy, though Lizet finds unexpected support in Papi, who drops her off at the airport.

Now working as a scientist, Lizet reflects back on her choice to leave Miami and to focus on her career. All choices have an opportunity cost, and Lizet considers what she gave up in terms of her Cuban-American identity, her sense of community, and her strained family relationships so she can have a career—and she prepares to visit Cuba for the first time.