In the after­math of a fire that spared Whis­per­ing Riv­er, Cas­sidy spends weeks search­ing her father’s house for two impor­tant box­es. One day, while bor­row­ing her father’s truck for work at the hot springs, she dis­cov­ers a lock­box in the rearview mir­ror and instinc­tive­ly knows the box­es she seeks are inside. After ear­ly morn­ing maneu­vers to acquire the keys from her father’s jeans, she access­es the lock­box, retriev­ing two card­board box­es filled with mem­o­ries.

Inside, she finds var­i­ous items, start­ing with a con­cert poster fea­tur­ing a sil­hou­ette of a vio­lin­ist at a venue named The Par­adise Lounge. Laugh­ter comes unex­pect­ed­ly as she real­izes that her father’s obses­sion with jazz might explain why he kept this rel­ic. How­ev­er, when she sees the name Wyn­ton Fall on the fly­er, the con­nec­tion to a boy from her past becomes over­whelm­ing­ly potent. Her mind races as she remem­bers the boy who once played music that seemed to res­onate with her pain, com­pli­cat­ing her emo­tions towards him.

As she con­tin­ues to dig through the box, Cas­sidy encoun­ters mem­o­ra­bil­ia tied to Wynton’s fam­i­ly, includ­ing pho­tos of him, his broth­er Miles, and their moth­er Bernadette. Real­iza­tions hit hard; Wyn­ton, Miles, and a lit­tle girl named Dizzy are sib­lings, named after famous jazz musi­cians. Their fam­i­ly his­to­ry inter­twines with her own, and she dis­cov­ers that her father, Dex­ter Brown, was intri­cate­ly con­nect­ed to this fam­i­ly, indi­cat­ed by arti­cles about Theo Fall, Wynton’s father, and his mys­te­ri­ous dis­ap­pear­ance.

Con­fused and alarmed, Cas­sidy sifts through more doc­u­ments, includ­ing a jour­nal that appears to be writ­ten by her great-grand­moth­er, Maria Guer­rero, detail­ing her life and the tragedies that befell the Fall fam­i­ly. The unset­tling threads become evi­dent; Cas­sidy real­izes that these peo­ple could be her fam­i­ly, lead­ing to an emo­tion­al break­down. She grap­ples with com­plex feel­ings as her roman­tic notions about Wyn­ton clash with the poten­tial famil­ial con­nec­tion.

Ulti­mate­ly, Cas­sidy spec­u­lates that she and Dizzy could per­haps be the bridge that mends gen­er­a­tions of famil­ial strife. She reflects deeply on her father’s aban­don­ment and the unfold­ing nar­ra­tive of love, loss, and iden­ti­ty, lead­ing her to a pro­found con­clu­sion about her fam­i­ly his­to­ry and the heart­break that shroud­ed her father’s past. In this rev­e­la­tion, she con­fronts the notion of betray­al, both in her father’s choic­es and her own awak­en­ing feel­ings towards Wyn­ton.