John Grady visits a brothel in Juarez and becomes captivated by a young Mexican girl, though he never approaches her.

John Grady searches Juarez until he learns the girl, named Magdalena, is working at the upscale White Lake brothel.

John Grady spends all his money on a night with Magdalena at the White Lake and realizes he loves her.

John Grady confesses to Billy that he is in love with Magdalena and wants to marry her and bring her to America.

Billy visits the White Lake and offers Eduardo two thousand dollars for Magdalena's freedom, but Eduardo refuses to sell her.

John Grady secretly meets Magdalena in a grove of willows, hears her tragic life story, and asks her to marry him.

John Grady asks Mac's permission to renovate an old cabin on the ranch as a home for himself and Magdalena.

John Grady pawns his grandfather's pistol and sells his prized horse to fund bribes and secure Magdalena's green card.

John Grady and Magdalena meet for the last time and finalize her plan to escape the White Lake before dawn.

Magdalena leaves the White Lake before dawn but is lured by a false driver and finds Tiburcio waiting by the river.

John Grady finds Magdalena's body in the Juarez morgue with her throat slit and stumbles out distraught.

John Grady takes his knife and money, releases his horse into the night, and hitches a ride back to Juarez.

John Grady and Eduardo duel with knives in the rain; fatally wounded, John Grady drives his blade up into Eduardo's head.

John Grady dies in a Juarez parking lot as Billy holds him, then Billy carries the body through the streets.

Billy wanders for decades after John Grady's death until an Arizona family takes him in and gives him a home.

John Grady Cole and Billy Parham work as cowboys on a New Mexico ranch near the Mexican border, but John Grady's life is upended when he spots a young woman named Magdalena at a Juarez brothel. Determined to rescue and marry her, John Grady navigates the dangerous world of the White Lake brothel, where the pimp Eduardo rules with quiet menace. Billy reluctantly helps his friend by approaching Eduardo directly, but Eduardo refuses to release Magdalena at any price, unwilling to admit he is himself in love with her. John Grady sacrifices his grandfather's pistol, his horse, and his savings to secure a future with Magdalena, renovating a cabin on the plain and obtaining the documents she needs to cross the border. Magdalena's escape is ambushed by Eduardo's enforcer Tiburcio, and John Grady finds her murdered body in the city morgue. Consumed by grief, John Grady seeks out Eduardo for a knife fight that kills them both, leaving Billy to carry his friend's body through the streets and spend the rest of his long life wandering a world that no longer has a place for him.

The headline events of John Grady's doomed love and final reckoning.

Billy and Troy drive to visit Troy's brother Elton and have dinner with Elton and his wife Rachel at their ranch.

A large owl crashes through the windshield of Billy and Troy's truck as they drive back toward the ranch.

John Grady struggles to lasso a wild colt in the barn despite a badly injured ankle from the horse's earlier kick.

A local man brings a lame horse for John Grady to train as a gift for his wife; John Grady refuses and rejects a bribe.

John Grady rides alone up a mountainside, returns late to the ranch, and then beats Mac at chess twice in the kitchen.

John Grady visits the White Lake without enough money to see Magdalena; a waiter delivers her note asking him not to forget her.

Eduardo sits in his office as Tiburcio reports that the same young American cowboy keeps returning to see Magdalena.

The one-eyed maid pins Magdalena down during a violent epileptic seizure while Eduardo enters and dismisses the watching women.

Billy, John Grady, and the other cowboys camp on the plain and listen to their dogs pursue a mountain lion through the night.

John Grady accompanies Mac and Oren to a horse auction, helping Mac outbid a rival for a string of horses.

Magdalena suffers an epileptic fit in the back of a taxi while watching a funeral procession pass through the street.

Magdalena wanders the dark streets of Juarez alone after leaving the hospital, refusing a kind stranger's offer of shelter.

Eduardo confronts Magdalena alone in her room and lists all the ways she has betrayed him, accusing her of being spoiled.

John Grady finishes the cabin renovation and moves furniture inside, making the small home on the plain ready for Magdalena.

Billy leaves Mac's ranch after John Grady's burial and spends the following years wandering, finding only sporadic work as a movie extra.

While the main tragedy unfolds around John Grady and Magdalena, the world of the ranch and the brothel is filled with equally vivid and consequential moments. Billy and Troy's road trip to visit Elton's family reveals the precariousness of the cowboy lifestyle, and a chance encounter with an owl shattering their windshield underscores the brutal indifference of the natural world. On the ranch, John Grady's extraordinary skill with horses is tested repeatedly, from taming an injured colt to refusing a bribe rather than take on a lame animal, demonstrating the purity of his character. Inside the White Lake, Eduardo watches Magdalena with a cold, possessive eye, and Tiburcio's surveillance of John Grady's visits signals the danger closing in around both lovers. Magdalena's epilepsy becomes a source of dread and superstition, from her violent seizures inside the brothel to a fit that lands her in a Juarez hospital, where she wanders the streets alone before returning to her captors. After John Grady's death, Billy briefly becomes the center of the story, leaving the ranch to live on the margins of a modernizing society that has no use for the last of the cowboys.

The secondary moments that shaped life on both sides of the border.

John Grady searches through multiple Juarez brothels and pays a dangerous man named Manolo to learn where Magdalena is.

The blind piano player warns John Grady about Magdalena's epilepsy and says she does not truly belong among the women at the White Lake.

John Grady waits in a Juarez hotel room for Magdalena to arrive for their planned meeting but she never comes.

John Grady tells Billy for the first time that he has a girl in Juarez and admits the situation is a mess.

Magdalena quietly warns John Grady inside the White Lake bar that he is in danger and Eduardo might kill her.

John Grady finds Mr. Johnson wandering the ranch yard in the dark and helps the confused old man back inside.

Mr. Johnson tells John Grady stories about his cowboy past on the porch and admits he once loved a woman who died.

John Grady and the cowboys track down and kill the pack of wild dogs that has been slaughtering cattle on the ranch.

John Grady asks the blind piano player to serve as wedding padrino; the player reveals Eduardo loves Magdalena and refuses the role.

Mac gives John Grady his late wife's wedding ring to use in the ceremony with Magdalena, refusing to take no for an answer.

Billy tells John Grady he has an outlaw heart as they ride horses across the upper plain together.

The one-eyed maid unlocks the brothel door for Magdalena before dawn and grabs her arm, begging her not to go.

Billy goes to the Juarez police after Magdalena's murder and phones Mac to warn him that John Grady is seeking revenge.

Billy hears the telephone ring after a restless night and learns his wounded friend is lying in a Juarez parking lot.

Elderly and homeless, Billy sleeps under a highway overpass and shares a long conversation about dreams, fate, and death with a stranger.

Beneath the main storyline runs a current of revelations and turning points that shape every character's fate. John Grady's obsessive search for Magdalena leads him through the dangerous underworld of Juarez, where he pays for information and receives early warnings he chooses to ignore, including the blind piano player's quiet insistence that Magdalena does not truly belong at the White Lake. Trusted allies like Billy and the piano player see the tragedy coming but cannot turn John Grady from his course, and even Mac offers what help he can by giving John Grady his late wife's ring. The hidden connections between characters gradually surface — the maid is Tiburcio's mother, Eduardo loves Magdalena as fiercely as John Grady does — making the final catastrophe feel both inevitable and deeply personal. After Magdalena's murder, Billy makes a desperate attempt to intercept events by going to the police and searching for his friend, but arrives too late. In old age, Billy's wandering brings him to a haunted, philosophical conversation with a stranger under an overpass, a final meditation on everything he has lost.

The discoveries, warnings, and fateful decisions that sealed everyone's destiny.