Young Jay visits the Philippines, tries to save a dying puppy, and only cousin Jun stops to console him.

Jay's father interrupts a video game session to inform Jay that cousin Jun has died.

Jay's mother explains that Jun was likely killed by government police as part of Duterte's crackdown on drug users.

An anonymous Instagram message tells Jay that Jun did nothing wrong and did not deserve to die.

Jay convinces his parents to allow him to fly to the Philippines over spring break, claiming he wants to reconnect with his heritage.

Jay arrives at Uncle Maning's luxurious gated Manila home and finds Jun's old bedroom stripped of every trace of him.

Jay discovers that his packet of Jun's letters has gone missing from his backpack on his first night in Manila.

Grace takes Jay to a massive Manila mall where he meets Mia, a journalism student involved in the underground anti-government movement.

Mia translates the Tagalog notations on Maning's list, revealing that someone located Jun and was awaiting Maning's instructions.

Maning dismisses Jay's questions about Jun at the art museum and orders Jay to leave his home that same day.

Jay arrives at his aunts' warm, welcoming home and learns that Jun lived there after being expelled and joined the anti-government underground movement.

Jay, Mia, and a professor travel to Jun's last known apartment in a dangerous Manila neighborhood and meet a young woman named Reyna.

Maning's family drives Jay seven hours to Legazpi to stay with his grandparents, and Grace secretly brings along one of Jun's stolen letters.

Jay accuses Maning of ordering Jun's execution; Maning grabs Jay by the throat and furiously denies any involvement in his son's death.

Jay asks his father's permission to defer college for a year and return to the Philippines to work for his aunts' human rights organization.

When Jay's father delivers the news that his Filipino cousin Jun has died, Jay cannot accept the official explanation and begins pushing for answers. An anonymous message convinces Jay to fly to the Philippines, where he quickly senses his uncle Maning is hiding something about Jun's fate. With the help of a journalism student named Mia, Jay pieces together evidence suggesting Maning may have arranged his own son's death through government police contacts. Jay's investigation forces a violent confrontation with Maning before the truth about Jun's life and death proves far more complicated than any simple villain story. By the time Jay boards the flight home, he has abandoned the video-game framework he brought to the Philippines and committed himself to returning and working for justice.

Jay's journey from learning of Jun's death to choosing a new future.

Jay skips class and smokes weed on a school rooftop with his only friend Seth, silently admitting to himself that he is drifting.

Jay packs Jun's entire bundle of old letters to bring with him to the Philippines, sensing Jun's ghost already hovering.

On the flight to Manila, Jay reads Jun's letter about a starving mother trying to give her own baby to a stranger on the street.

Jay rolls down the SUV window to give money to a street child begging at a stoplight and is immediately scolded by his aunt.

Uncle Maning lectures Jay at dinner about how Americans colonized the Philippines and exploited its people and resources.

Jay sneaks into Maning's locked office and photographs a list of names that includes Jun's, written in Tagalog he cannot read.

Jay and Mia pause at the jellyfish tank in the aquarium and Jay shares a story about a species that can live forever but rarely survives adolescence.

Jay attends Sunday church with Maning's family but finds the elaborate service emotionally hollow and falls asleep in the pew.

Jay's aunts reveal that his own parents in Michigan have long been among the most generous donors to the aunts' human rights foundation.

Jay finds a business card for a small neighborhood bookshop tucked inside the collection of Audre Lorde poems in Jun's belongings.

Mia arrives at the aunts' home and reveals that the person who answered the bookshop number did not know Jun was dead and asked who would run Jun's website.

Jay scrolls through Grace's Facebook account and is shaken by her unflinching documentation of the government's extrajudicial killings.

Jay finds one of Jun's letters in Grace's backpack and she confesses she stole them because her family refuses to hold any memorial for Jun.

Jay and Grace, with the help of Jun's mother and grandparents, organize an impromptu backyard memorial service for Jun.

On the flight home to Michigan, Jay reads Jun's letter in which Jun jokes that if he could be a saint, he would be the patron saint of nothing.

Before Jay even leaves Michigan, the texture of his comfortable, drifting life sets the stage for his transformation. His flight to Manila and first days with Maning's family force a confrontation with poverty and privilege he has never had to face. Secondary characters — Grace, Mia's professor, and the bookstore contact — steadily widen the picture of who Jun was and what he stood for. Each new piece of evidence, from a website to a poetry book, reframes Jay's understanding of his cousin's life as something more complex and courageous than he imagined. By the time Jay boards his return flight home, he carries with him Jun's final letter about saints, a fitting symbol of a journey that has turned a mystery into a mission.

The encounters and discoveries that deepen Jay's understanding of Jun and the Philippines.

Jay sits alone in his room after learning of Jun's death, his sadness and confusion unexpectedly curdling into a deep, inexplicable anger.

Jay retrieves Jun's letters from under his bed and reads the last one, which Jun sent three years earlier, feeling crushing guilt over never having replied.

Jay steps off the plane at the Manila airport and feels awkwardly, visibly American — a stranger in the country of his own birth.

Jay dreams that Jun's bullet-ridden ghost appears before him and asks what happened to him.

Maning takes the family to the National Museums of the Philippines, where Jay hears for the first time about centuries of foreign colonial occupation of his native country.

Jay learns that his aunts Chato and Ines are a committed same-sex couple who have been ostracized from the conservative Catholic family as a result.

Jay notices that unlike his uncle's bare walls, his aunts' home is filled with framed family photographs, including one of him and Jun on a basketball court.

Jay pages through Jun's copy of Audre Lorde's poems, reads 'A Litany for Survival,' and is overwhelmed — calling it a typhoon.

Jay swims off Katungkulan Beach and realizes he cannot claim the country's beauty without also claiming its poverty, its history, and its problems.

Jay discovers that the anonymous message that brought him to the Philippines was sent by Grace, who tells him she wanted to see if he cared.

Jay learns that Jun left Reyna's apartment suddenly, not out of abandonment, but to protect her from the dangers of his anti-government activism.

Uncle Danilo reveals that Maning secretly sought the priest's help to rescue Jun from addiction in the months before Jun's death.

Uncle Danilo tells Jay that no one will ever know exactly who killed Jun, shattering Jay's hope that the mystery could be cleanly solved.

At the memorial service, Jay reads aloud the letter he should have written to Jun years ago, saying that people are never simply one thing.

Maning silently leaves his place by the back door and crosses the yard to join his family's prayer circle around the candles lit in Jun's memory.

Jay's transformation is driven not just by what he investigates but by what he is forced to feel and accept at each stage of the journey. From the shock of Jun's death through Jay's first stunned hours on Filipino soil, a series of revelations steadily dismantle his comfortable assumptions. Encounters with his aunts' love, with a poem that hits him like a typhoon, and with a beach that demands he claim both beauty and hardship reshape his identity in ways his investigation alone never could. The climactic revelations from Uncle Danilo, who confirms Jun's addiction and admits his death may never be fully explained, force Jay to abandon the detective's need for clean answers. What remains is a young man who has learned that silence is not safety, that grief must point outward, and that his hyphenated Filipino-American identity is something to be claimed rather than avoided.