(There are Spoilers) Driving down a lonely country road one rainy afternoon Joanna Kndall, Margaret Colin,is distracted for a brief moment and runs down a little girl riding a bicycle on the side of the roadway. Doing what she can to keep the injured youngster comfortable Joanna goes to call for help at a local service station. Before she can give her name Joanna hangs up the phone in order to get back to the girl and see if she's all right; it's then and there when the nightmare begins for Joanna.
Heart-wrenching drama that can effect any one of us when you try to do the right thing but are influenced by the words and feelings of those around you. Getting back to the accident site Joanna sees it's cordoned off by the highway police. Before she can tell them what happened, and her involvement in it, Joanna starts to have second thought about turning herself in.
What would at first have been a tragic accident turns out to be a hit-and-run with Joanna facing time behind bars, if caught. Even far worse she has to live with herself in what she did seeing almost every day the family of the little girl she ran down Kelly Corey, Dallas Deremer, who goes to the same school as her two daughters Mindy & Holly, Gretchen Esau & Kira Posey. Joanna's life starts to come apart as she tries to keep the truth from her friends and family, not to mention the Eaton Police, of what she was involved with in little Kelly's accident.
You can easily see how the words of her friends and neighbors as well as her husband Doug, Drew Phillbury, about the hit and run, effected Joanna. It was those words that had Joanna unable to bring herself to admit what she did not just for her own concern but her two daughters and her husband as well. Feeling that they'll be shunned by the people that they knew as friends as well as neighbors for years.
Joanna on the verge of losing her mind tries to implicate her friend Nancy Grayson, Sherry Hursey, in Kelly's hit-and-run accident by trying to plant her earing, that she lost in Joanna house, at the accident site. It's then that she realizes what she's doing and suddenly stops,keeping her from making an already bad situation even worse, not wanting to have Kelly's accident but also innocent Nancy's freedom and reputation on her conscience as well.
Margraet Colin gives a stunning performance as the guilt ridden Joanna Kendall and you can really feel for her seeing how she's being eaten up inside and not knowing just what to do. Wanting at first to turn herself in to the police a series of miscalculations causes Joanna to become a fugitive from the law. When she eventually did Joanna became the most hated and despised person in Eaton.
Not being herself, when still at large, Joanna's husband starts to feel that she's either back to smoking or even having an affair. Never in a million years would Doug have thought that Joanna was the person who ran down little Kelly and left her to die on that rain soaked road! The look on his face, with his mouth quivering, when he found out the truth said it all.
The last few minutes of the movie took a lot out of you knowing what Joanna was going through, not to downplay the suffering of the injured Kelly Corey and her parents, and how she now has to face the music for what she did and have to live with it for the rest of her life.
