Walking past Young Mom with Baby, Older Lady Hears Lullaby She Wrote for Her Long-Lost Kid — Story of the Day

A woman’s daughter vanishes at the age of three in Central Park and for the next 25 years, she searches tirelessly until she hears a young mother singing.

The parents who took their children to the park were often disturbed by the appearance of an older woman who would stare at their children hungrily, then turn her face away in disappointment.

Carol Kincaid had been haunting that park for twenty-five years, and if the happy moms and dads with their toddlers had known her story they would have been even more disturbed and uneasy.

Twenty-five years before, Carol had been one of them, sitting on a park bench, watching her beautiful three-year-old whizzing down the slide and building castles in the sandpit.

But all her happiness and all her tranquility had been swept away in just seven seconds. Carol had been giving her little daughter Amber some juice and when the toddler finished, she had walked to the nearby trash can.

Seven seconds, surely it couldn’t have been more? But when she turned around again, Amber was gone. Just gone. No one had seen anything, heard anything.

For days Amber’s little face was on every newscast, and the whole world was looking for her. Then, a few weeks later, it seemed that New York moved on. Another child vanished, and Amber was forgotten.

Carol’s initially supportive friends and family stayed away. It was one thing to help someone through the pain of death, but Amber wasn’t dead. Carol was sure Amber wasn’t dead, she was just gone.

Carol was suspended in a nightmare. Her pain was constant, agonizing. She couldn’t move on from that horrific moment when she turned around and her daughter was gone, she had no closure.

Her marriage fell apart under the strain of Carol’s continuing search for her daughter. Her husband called it an obsession, Carol called it a necessity. Couple’s therapy didn’t work, and so on what would have been Amber’s 8th birthday, her parents divorced.

Twenty-five years and Carol was still coming to the same park, standing on the edges of all that happiness and laughter, wondering if her daughter was alright if she was happy if she was even alive.

Carol was about to walk away when she heard the strains of a familiar melody. A few feet away a young woman was bent over a pram singing to her baby. “Oh little Katy has ten...