Another finalist for the National Book Award, this novel focuses on one Haitian in Miami and her family. But more than that, it focuses on the effects of being in a mass shooting event. Magnolia is a realtor in a mall out shopping for a birthday present for her daughter, Zoe, when she hears gunfire. Along with many other shoppers, she runs and hides in a restaurant. Traumatized, eventually she manages to find her car and drive home. Once there, she does not tell anyone about the shooting, not her daughter, nor her husband who is now living separately from her at her request. For several days, she secretly goes to her computer and researches what happened at the mall, the dead, the living, the one person who saved others at the expense of his own life. She still tells no one that she was there. Because she is behaving a bit differently, people ask her about it and finally just think she is stressed about about her job and her mother who has mental health issues, still living in Haiti and undergoing emergency surgery. Magnolia begins to worry that she is becoming like her mother. She is also worried about the gangs getting closer and closer to where her parents live in Haiti and their home, which her father built himself after selling their farm and investing everything in the house.

Eventually she does tell her husband she was at the shooting; he is horrified that she has been suffering and told no one. Her half brother from an affair her father had calls to say that her mother has survived the surgery but it is no longer safe where they live. With all these events the novel focuses on love and whether it can help a person protect family and self. What wins out in the heart? Optimism or fear? The title, Déy, comes of the Haitian creole word for mourning to focus on the importance of sharing grief rather than holding it in, the importance of family ties as well as the task of living between two cultures.