On a cold, gray winter morning, Grace MacLean and her best friend Judith, take their horses out for a ride in the woods, giggling as teenagers do while their horses stride through the powdery snow. One minute they’re happily riding along. The next, one of the horses loses its footing, bumps the other, and both riders and horses are sliding down an icy slope onto a road, where a logging truck is barreling at highway speed, and the unthinkable happens.

Both Grace and her horse, Pilgrim, are severely hurt, Grace having part of her leg amputated, Pilgrim suffering devastating physical injuries, both emotionally damaged, seemingly beyond help. Judith and her horse were not so lucky. Both were killed in the accident. Against the veterinarian’s advice, Annie, Grace’s mother refuses to have Pilgrim put down, though the horse is clearly traumatized, and a danger to himself and his handlers.

As her physical healing begins, Grace finds it hard to adjust to her physical limitations. She becomes depressed, withdrawn, and sullen, and Pilgrim becomes more of a rogue with every passing day. Annie is desperate. She feels Pilgrim is the key, the only link to Grace’s emotional survival. If she has the vet put him down, she fears she will lose Grace.

A high-powered, workaholic magazine editor, Annie knows how to research. She finds Tom Booker, a cowboy, a horse whisperer, in Montana and asks him to re-train Pilgrim, instill in him the trust he once had, allowing him to bond, once again, with Grace. Tom knows the real training begins with the human. He asks that Grace accompany Annie on the trek from New York to the remote mountains of Montana, too. Though Annie is reluctant to expose Grace to further emotional stress, she agrees to Tom’s terms.

Tom lives on a ranch with his brother and his family. He knows heartbreak, as his wife left him preferring a more social, urban lifestyle to Tom’s simple and more introspective ways.

As Grace and Pilgrim make the slow, painful journey toward healing, Tom and Annie develop a romantic attraction to each other, knowing that acting on their feelings would incur deep, irreversible damage to Annie’s family, and destroy any progress Grace is making in her emotional recovery.

Annie becomes mesmerized with the west and ranch life to the point that when she’s fired from her magazine job, she seems unfazed. Her feelings for Tom make her question her relationship with Robert, her husband, and the choices she’s made in life—from family to career.

When Robert arrives on the ranch unexpectedly, and Grace is about to make a breakthrough, Annie and Tom must make the decision that, either way, will end in heartbreak.