The film begins with a Flashback (narrative) narrated by Leland P. Fitzgerald, describing how he could not remember the details of the day that he killed an Intellectual disability boy named Ryan Pollard. Leland is arrested. Ryan's parents, Harry and Karen, sisters Becky and Julie, and Julie's live-in boyfriend Allen grieve the loss of their loved one. Leland's divorced mother, Marybeth, is desperate to see her son, while his father, famous writer Albert Fitzgerald, discovers his son's fate in a newspaper and returns home to be there for the trial.