Writer Simon Goldberg offers to drive his wife Melanie Goldberg and their two kids to town from their summer home in Long Island due to the coming rain. Melanie declines and walks her two children to a bakery, where her toddler son Joshua is kidnapped out of his safety harness by a neighbor named Darien, a serial kidnapper who has gone undetected his whole life despite killing several of his victims when they cry. Within a year of Joshua’s abduction, Simon and Melanie have split up, remarried, and have not had any new children. Guilt-ridden Melanie grieves the loss of her child under her own watch, and suspects that her father’s friend, an older man with whom Melanie had a brief sexual affair, was responsible. Simon knows of this man, and wonders if Joshua was the man’s son or his own. Joshua’s baby sister Jessica grows up, marries and has children. She works at a childcare center one day a week. Joshua grows up in another family’s home and learns of his abduction through years of research, obsessing over his estranged mother. DNA evidence shows that Joshua is indeed related to the father who raised him after the abduction, the friend of Melanie’s father. Fifty years after his abduction, Joshua reconnects with his sister Jessica. Joshua joins Jessica’s family for Thanksgiving and reunites with his mother.