Plot
Chicago-based Mea Harper and her husband Kal are seeing a marital counselor for infidelity and his extremely overbearing mother Azalia. At a restaurant to celebrate the matriarch's birthday, the older woman tirelessly undercuts her.
Mea's brother-in-law, assistant district attorney Ray Hawthorne, loudly declares he must unload paintings his wife Charlise got from charismatic artist Zyair Malloy as he is set to prosecute him for murdering his girlfriend Hydie.
Mea is a defense lawyer who Zyair approaches to take on his case. Not respecting boundaries, he barges in to her law offices without an appointment to convince her. Zyair insists that Ray hates him, but claims he doesn't know why. Mea promises to look over his case and get back to him.
After Mea and Charlise's boxing class, she reveals she is considering taking on Zyair's defense. Charlise wants her to promise she won't, but she doesn't. Then Kal sees her reading Zyair's file and demands she not take it. Mea points out he's been unemployed eight months, so has no leverage in stopping her from taking the case.
Not only did Kal lose his job as an anesthesiologist due to drug and alcohol abuse, but Mea gives Ray money each month to help pay for insurance-less Azalia's cancer treatments. She gives him the option to let her consider Zyair's case or tell his unemployment secret to his family, so he backs off.
To avoid the paparazzi that plague him, Mea visits Zyair in his loft-artist studio. He tells her about his relationship with Hydie, a Mexican he met waiting tables in Italy. They had an intense six months which abruptly ended when she vanished.
Mea shares with Zyair the overwhelming case the prosecution has against him, including copious amounts of blood that match Hydie's type, skull fragments and her DNA. When she presses him to explain it, it upsets him. Mea goes on to show Zyair a video message by Hydie, supposedly fearing he might kill her and finally mentions a $3 million life insurance policy. Both of these he finds ludicrous.
Azalia and the rest of the family swarm in on Mea to openly pressure her to not take on Zyair's case, as Ray has decided to run for mayor. This solidifies her determination to defend him. After a conversation between Mea, Ray and the judge who will oversee the case, he allows for both in-laws to be involved.
Meeting with her private investigator friend Jimmy, Mea gets him to question Zyair and he concurs that he can't read him either. He continues to Mexico to research Hydie. Meanwhile, as her marriage with Kal starts to fizzle out, Mea starts to find herself attracted to Zyair.
Mea and Zyair sleep together after she is mistakenly led to believe by Jimmy that Kal is seeing another woman, when he was actually visiting Azalia at a hotel room where she is recovering from chemotherapy. Disgusted with herself, Mea announces to Zyair that she's passing him to another lawyer.
Distraught, Mea tells Jimmy, who convinces her to talk with the prosecution's character witness against Zyair. The Evervine Gallery owner Reneé is the older woman who'd discovered him. Mae is sickened upon hearing of how he seduced her, as it was exactly the same as with her. She confirms it upon discovering several portraits of other women under her own hanging above his bed.
Needing to clear her head after being forced to confess to the affair, Mea goes to the Dominican Republic and finds Hydie working as a maid at a resort. Although she can't get her to talk, Mea tries to contact Ray to get investigators to track her down and get Zyair out of jail, as he'd entered a plea bargain.
Ray convinces Mea to return to his suburban Chicago home, where she gets a message from Jimmy revealing that Azalia was lying about having cancer. It turns out she and Ray cooked up a whole scheme against Zyair as he had an affair with Charlise.
Azalia stabs Charlise dead, so Mea then hurries out of the house while being pursued by Ray and Azalia. She jumps into Ray's pickup truck, while Azalia gets on its hood. Mea kills her by crashing the pickup truck into a tree.
Mea runs into Kal on the road, who she soon learns was also in on the scheme and plans to keep her in line through violence. She responds by unbuckling his seatbelt and making him drive into the path of a tractor trailer truck, causing him to fly through the windshield and die.
Ray is arrested and Zyair is exonerated. He publicly thanks Mea and privately asks to see her again, but she ignores him.
