Before that day, I was just a mother driving down Route 9 with my seven-year-old son, Daniel. He sat beside me begging for a Sprite as if it were the most important thing in the world. It felt like an ordinary afternoon.

Everything changed at a roadside rest stop. I went inside for less than two minutes to buy his drink. When I came back, Daniel was gone.

The police responded quickly. Search dogs, helicopters, volunteers, and investigators flooded the area. They asked the same questions repeatedly until the words lost all meaning.

As months passed, the search slowed. The volunteers disappeared, the headlines faded, and eventually my son became another unsolved case filed away in a drawer-