A Cuban woman receives a visa and a plane ticket from her estranged father. Her father had left Cuba long ago, denouncing his daughter as a worthless lesbian. In San Francisco, he found faith and started a new family, which encouraged him to reach out to his daughter. Tired of the endless poverty of Cuba and its lack of romantic prospects, she decides to leave for Miami, from which she will take a connecting flight to San Francisco. However, shortly before and during her trip, she experiences temporary blindness and deafness, causing her to panic. She calls up an artist friend, Laura, whom she’d met in Cuba, and decides to stay with her in Miami instead of visiting her father. Laura gives the woman free housing, helps her find a job, and gifts her an old laptop. The woman looks up people she’d met in Cuba, including a Canadian tourist who’d traveled to the Maldives, which the protagonist thinks is endlessly beautiful. When Laura leaves for London, the woman has the house all to herself, and she dances across its rooms. At work not long after, the woman’s hearing goes out completely. She goes to the hospital, where she learns that there’s a benign tumor in her head, that will eventually make it impossible for her to see or hear. With not enough money to pay for surgery, the woman decides that she will leave for the Maldives, where she will be able to drift on the water, free.