As a very young girl, Isabella dreams of going to America and falling in love. Her parents are ranchers in a mountainous region of Southern Mexico, and they want her to marry within her culture and tradition when she comes of age. She rebels and escapes one fateful night, journeying alone to America. She encounters several overwhelming hardships on her dangerous journey but manages to make it to Los Angeles, where she falls in love with her English-language teacher, Tom. Her plans to be with Tom are thwarted, however, and she instead becomes the victim of a vicious rival drug gang of her cousin’s and is relegated to a life of indentured prostitution to survive.
Meanwhile, Tom has since become involved in another relationship with an American woman, Lanie, who takes him on a romantic adventure through France and Switzerland, where he ends up falling in love with her. They return to Los Angeles, remain together, and open a photography studio. The teacher plans to marry Lanie, but because of her condition (Type 1 Diabetes), her blood sugar plummets one night while driving, and she is killed in an automobile accident, leaving Tom devastated. He descends into a world of isolation, deep depression, and alcohol and prescription drug abuse to try to overcome his grief, only to be further alienated by the advent of COVID 19.
On a chance encounter, he and Isabella are reunited, and each tries to help the other out of their dire circumstances. Over the course of the story, Isabella tries to help heal Tom from his crushing grief over Lanie’s death, and in a climactic scene, Tom attempts to rescue Isabella from her servitude. As in the journey of life, each of these characters is searching for his or her true destiny, which posits the question, “Are we in charge of our lives, or is life really just random experience, driven purely by chance?” Does life take us where it wants to take us, as the character Tom posits, or do we actually shape our own destiny? Isabella does ultimately realize her true fate, which is certainly not what she expected at the outset of the story.
