High-powered fashion photographer Claire Jameson finds herself stranded in middle America on the way to her dream Christmas-time wedding in Aspen. Unable to get another flight or rent a car, Claire is reduced to begging for a ride. When the rugged former artist turned teacher, Tom Pullman and his 13-year old daughter Hilly kindly offer to take her, none of them realize that their journey is just beginning, and it will leave all of them in a very different place than where they began.

In 1998, three white men in the small town of Jasper, Texas, chained a black man to the back of their pickup truck and dragged him to his death...